The Rise And Fall Of Kodak

Great stuff by Kenny Suleimanagich. A few things of note. First:

At its peak, in 1996, Kodak was rated the fourth-most-valuable global brand. That year, the company had about two-thirds of the global photo market, annual revenues of $16 billion, and a market capitalization of $31 billion.

Today, Kodak trades around twelve cents a share. Its market cap is roughly $32 million. Yes, “million” with an “m”.

How will it be saved going forward?:

Among other things, Kodak CEO Antonio M. Perez is betting his commercial-printing business on high-volume customers who need a lot of ink, like product-packaging manufacturers. Even if this latest “pivot” is successful — and a lot of people think it’s a stretch — the company would be reduced to helping other people make the boxes used to ship the devices that will take the photographs of the future.

Sad.

In the 1980s, one Kodak engineer, impressed by the then-new Macintosh II computer, began making proposals for Kodak to move into the digital realm. By the late 80s, the company had already made a four megapixel sensor — and did nothing with it. Why? As former Wired editor Chris Anderson puts it:

“Who could afford that?” Anderson fired back, unimpressed. “Macs were really expensive. Computing technology couldn’t have kept up until much later.”

Finally, as a reminder that some of the most transformative things start as pure gimmicks, consider the original George Eastman patent from the late 1800s:

In his original patent, he wrote that his improvements applied to “that class of photographic apparatus known as ‘detective cameras,’ ” — concealed and disguised devices, made possible by a new wave of miniaturization, that were used mostly for a lowbrow entertainment: snapping pictures of people unaware. Cameras equipped with single-use chemical plates were hidden in opera glasses, umbrellas, and other everyday objects, and sharing the surreptitious, random, and sometimes compromising photos that resulted became a popular fad. Eastman, in other words, was obsessively tinkering with what many people at the time would have considered a cheap novelty or a toy. Like Netflix in its early days, Kodak relied on the U.S. Postal Service: Customers sent their spent cameras to Rochester, where the film was removed, processed, and cut into frames; the resulting negatives and prints, along with the camera, reloaded with a fresh roll of film, were returned to the sender. Suddenly it was easy for anyone to take lots of pictures, and Eastman’s new business became a juggernaut almost overnight.

Everyone out there: keep tinkering.

Inside The Immortality Business

Fascinating look inside the world of Cryonics (the freezing of the body to “cure” death later) by Josh Dean:

I don’t think it’s overly reductive to state that there are three possible outcomes for those who choose the freezer over a coffin:

One, science never overcomes the obstacles that stand in the way of bringing patients back and they are either thawed and disposed of the way they would have been disposed of originally. This is not a terrible outcome. They’ll have no idea it even happened.

Two, the patients are thawed in whatever state they may be (fully preserved, kind of preserved, badly preserved) and fatal issues are cured using newfound treatments, while nanotechnology repairs all the cellular damage, catastrophic and otherwise. If the body is old and decrepit, they’ll get a new one, composed of parts grown in a lab, or maybe just synthetic. This is Avatar.

Three, the body doesn’t matter. All that does is the brain, and some sort of heretofore unimagined technology will allow future humans to thaw and then access the data inside the brain and upload that data directly into a machine, or the machine, or whatever.

The story of the Pippin game console

Speaking of Apple and gaming, here’s a great look back at the history of the Pippin gaming console by Adam Volk:

The story of the Pippin reads like a geekier, technological version of a Greek tragedy. It has its heroes and its villains. There’s a strange artifact with supposedly untold magical powers. And like all good tragedies, it’s a story filled with its fair share of hubris, with characters who were destined to fail almost before they even began.

Alex Seropian, the co-founder of Bungie Studios who was tapped to help with the Pippin (after the success of their Mac game, Marathon), has a great line:

For Seropian and his fellow developers at Bungie, the death of the Pippin was a blip. They would soon go on to develop Halo for the Xbox in partnership with another tech giant, Microsoft. But when Apple was developing the Pippin, “we didn’t think too much of console gaming,” Seropian said. “Console gaming was a whole other industry that had its own jargon, and having Apple show up with Bandai—it was sort of like meeting a girl who went to school on the other side of the tracks, but we had a mutual friend, so we went on a couple of dates. But we didn’t have an expectation we were going to get married or anything. And I guess you could say she turned out to be a drug addict that ODed, and we never hung out anymore.”

RIP, indeed.

If I was only concerned about managing Nintendo for this year and next year — and not about what the company would be like in 10 or 20 years — then I’d probably say that my point of view is nonsense. But if we think 20 years down the line, we may look back at the decision not to supply Nintendo games to smartphones and think that is the reason why the company is still here.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, in a post-E3 interview with WSJ (though I’m linking to The Verge because of the WSJ’s ridiculous paywall — funny how content finds a way to live outside paywalls).

This is the argument that comes up time and again as to why Nintendo shouldn’t (and won’t) bring their games on the popular smartphone platforms. The next step is always for people to point to Apple as an example of a company that stood their ground, and when they didn’t — when it was attack of the clones time in the 1990s — it almost killed them.

I just view this as a very different circumstance. Apple nearly died because of incompetence. Nintendo is bleeding because the world has completely changed around them. And I cannot see how it changes back.

Nintendo needs to adapt. Which, by the way, Apple did as well. They did not become the most valuable company in the world because they continued making Macs.

"Fertile Ground"

Marco Arment on iOS 7:

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

This is exactly right.

The Movie Studios Will Implode

David S. Cohen, writing about a panel on the future of the movie business at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, featuring Steven Spielberg and George Lucas:

“There’s eventually going to be a big meltdown,” Spielberg said. “There’s going to be an implosion where three or four or maybe even a half-dozen of these mega-budgeted movies go crashing into the ground and that’s going to change the paradigm again.”

Lucas predicted that after that meltdown, “You’re going to end up with fewer theaters, bigger theaters with a lot of nice things. Going to the movies will cost 50 bucks or 100 or 150 bucks, like what Broadway costs today, or a football game. It’ll be an expensive thing. … (The movies) will sit in the theaters for a year, like a Broadway show does. That will be called the ‘movie’ business.”

And this is going to happen faster than most people realize. There are maybe a half dozen big movies worth seeing in the theater every year (and that’s a good year). The rest are crap or indies. And those independent films will never scale the way Hollywood needs them to in order to keep the current system intact.