Kodak - roll up, roll up...

9 Oct 2011 - When was it? When was that point when the top guys at Kodak realised that the time had just slipped by when there was a chance of changing horses? When the skills they had could be hitched to another need and the future secured, when times past could be safely consigned to the corporate museum and another few decades of profitability opened up.

Maybe it was never recognised. Perhaps that was the problem. But now they've reached the point where the sensible thing to do is get in the lawyers and wind-up merchants to put in place a Plan B for cessation of normal operating activities.

Now, they just might survive. This might all be a little premature. But the word on the Street seems to be that the end is just around the corner, and another famous name is set to join PanAm and Woolworth in the scrapbook of famous failed business ventures.

And of all things they tried to mix it in the colour printer business. Let's think about this. "No future in wet films, nobody needs our cheap wet film cameras, nobody needs our wet film giant processing laboraties. So let's take on the highly advanced Japanese companies who have decades of digital electronics experience behind them and see how we get on." Not very well, is the answer.

The logic they followed is interesting, and holds a lesson. Here's what they said: "We have a business that was great at producing pictures for people. So let's turn it into a business where we produce pictures for people in a completely different way that we know nothing about, and that lots of people already know a great deal about. That should work." Maybe not.

What if they had gone a different route? Let's think about their corporate skills - very good at handling films with complex chemical systems built into them. Excellent at handling large volumes of consumer goods and getting them back to the right consumers. Dab hand at coming up with cheap devices that encourage penetration and consumption.

For goodness sakes, they own one of the universally-known brand names - Paul Simon even wrote a song about Kodak. It must be worth saving for that alone - so what can we cook up with this lot?

Films - how about entering pharma and coming up with a means of delivering drugs through the skin or with a controlled release? Encapsulating food ingredients in soluble strips for adding to recipes? Bit of a stretch...

Handling - building a fulfilment business? A direct mail business? Shaky...

Devices - a design business for consumer goods manufacturers? Dodgy...

Well, I don't pretend to have the answer. But by the look of it, neither did they. I wonder if anyone went through this exercise, and looked at what their transferable skills were, rather than the obvious end-point of what they did.

Maybe the lesson is just that if you only have one trick and that trick stops being popular, give it up and give the money back - while you still have some to give back. Nothing is forever - not even pictures.