According to The Wall Street Journal, the camera maker Kodak is currently preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy following a long battle to keep any sustainable business.
The announcement has caused some observers to declare that Kodak’s demise may have been caused by:
an inability to innovate or
A failure to be aware of the transition from analog to digital cameras or
A failure to compete with the increasing use of cameras in mobile phones.
In reality the opposite is true. Are substantiated. The only place Kodak failed to make a mistake was not being able to comprehend what people take photos for or how they use them after they’ve taken pictures.
Before examining the reasons people take pictures and the reasons why Kodak did it wrong, Let’s look the two main reasons that others have given for Kodak’s failings: phone cameras have replaced the stand-alone camera, and Kodak was not able to come up with new ideas.
The dedicated camera is not working
An article published for ReadWriteWeb technology columnist John Paul Titlow claims Kodak is failing due to the dominance of camera phones.
The article Titlow utilizes an image (see below) of Flickr. This photo-sharing site shows the increase in the use of this iPhone camera over a variety of single lens reflex (SLR) camera models.
Click here for a larger picture. Flickr
This graph isn’t telling the complete story.
Then, I downloaded Flickr files and analyzed the amount of photos posted to Flickr in the last year by a variety of prominent phone and camera manufacturers.
The following graphs show that photos taken using camera phones are only about 3 percent in the entire. It could be slightly higher, as Flickr cannot always determine the camera model that took the photo; however, it’s an extremely small portion of the overall total.
The origin of Flickr.com photographs, taken by the manufacturer of cameras. David Glance
Another thing to consider is that Kodak cameras account only for about 6% of all images, and Canon as well as Nikon are the dominant players in this field.
(Admittedly, amount of photos on Flickr is approximately five percent less than that for Facebook. It could be interesting to duplicate this analysis with Facebook data. However, there’s no reason to believe that the results will be significantly different.)
The origin of Flickr.com photographs, taken by camera type. David Glance
“Kodak was not able to innovate.”
Kodak’s financial woes don’t necessarily stem from an inability to innovate or a lack of understanding of the transition from printing to digital photos. In actual fact, Kodak has been involved in the development of digital cameras in virtually every step.
Kodak Electrical engineer Steve Sasson actually “invented” the digital camera in 1975.
Kodak collaborated in 1991 with Nikon at the beginning of 1991 in order to develop a professional digital camera sporting 1.3 Megapixels (you can purchase 12-megapixel cameras at less than $100 right now).
It was in 1995 that Kodak introduced the initial “point-and-shoot” camera.
One of the biggest assets of Kodak is its extensive collection of patents that company management has recently been in the process of selling. Kodak has also been seeking other businesses, such as phone makers Apple as well as Research in Motion, for infringement of their patents regarding the ability to show preview images on phones.
The first digital cameras, invented in 1975, made use of cassette tapes to keep images. Kodak
Why do people take photos, and what do they do with the images
The reason Kodak made a mistake was the perception it was that the people still took pictures, which they later printed.
