r/interesting • u/tyrion2024 • 19d ago

MISC. After Steve Jobs learned about Windows (which used a mouse & a GUI), he accused Bill Gates of stealing Apple's idea. Gates replied "Well Steve...I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox & I broke into his house to steal the TV set & found out that you had already stolen it."

https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/bill-gates-steve-jobs-friends-feud-a7627431.html
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u/Telvin3d 19d ago

Kodak is a bit different. They were fundamentally a high end chemical processing company that happened to specialize in film. They had a whole lot of money sloshing around, and did a bunch of associated R&D, but they were a chemicals company. They didn’t make cameras, or lenses, or really hardware of any sort.

So, what were they supposed to do? It’s the year 1990, and you’re a chemical company that’s pretty sure that twenty years from now your business is going to get completely eaten by computer chip manufacturers. Now what? Do you try and start a chip fab from scratch? See if you can become Intel faster than Intel can wipe you out?

Or do you just milk your hugely profitable business as it slowly winds down?

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u/bolanrox 19d ago

do what fuji did at the start and partner with Nikon to make digital SLRs

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u/Telvin3d 19d ago

A big difference is that Fuji is/was your standard big Japanese conglomerate. Film was their biggest division, and what they were known for, but they already had everything from a pharmaceutical and biosciences divisions to office supplies.

Kodak actually did try and do some co-branded and white label digital camera sales. No one bought them. Why buy a Kodak branded Nikon or Canon digital camera, when you could just buy a Nikon or Canon camera?

Without manufacturing anything themselves, Kodak had zero value added to offer 

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u/lewis_1102 19d ago

I bought one 😂

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u/MacrosInHisSleep 19d ago

You do you want killing your business someone else? Or yourself? If you can see the future and want to survive in it you have to pivot.

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u/escapefromelba 18d ago

Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975.

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u/Telvin3d 18d ago

A small engineering team at Kodak put together the first working proof-of-concept for a digital camera in 1975. It’s worth making the distinction that at no point did Kodak ever have the capability of building an actual functioning digital camera themselves. This isn’t a product they produced, and then walked away from. 

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u/escapefromelba 18d ago

Kodak invented the world’s first megapixel CCD sensor in 1986, capable of recording 1.4 million pixels. This was a massive technical leap that made practical, high-resolution digital cameras feasible for the first time. Throughout the late 1980s, Kodak developed specialized digital imaging systems and hand-held prototypes for government, space, and military applications long before bringing them to consumers.  Kodak spent the late '80s engineering what became the Kodak DCS-100 -  the world's first commercial digital SLR.