130년 역사 미국 기업을 대표했던 코닥이 파산했다

코닥- 131년의 역사를 가진 세계최고의 최첨단 기업의 대명사이었던 코닥이 결국 파산하였다.

 

그동안 코닥 필름 한번 안 써 본 사람이 누가 있겠어? 

 

19세기 20세기 역사를 새로 쓴 사진의 발명.     영화 텔레비젼도 사진기 발명에서 나왔다.  예술에 대한 개념도 바꾼 사진기. 기술 발전의 대명사이기도 했던 코닥.  결국 세상 변화를 리드했던 기업이 세상 변화에 대처를 하지 못했다는 아이러니를 보여준다.

 

 

뭐가 잘못된 것일까?  어디에서 부터.  미국 장수 대표기업 코닥이 다우존스 지수에서 빠진 지 얼마안돼 결국 파산하고 만다.  이 세상에서 모든 것은 변한다.  변하지 않는 것은 없다.

 

다음은 마켓워치 카피입니다.

 

Eastman Kodak Co., the photography company founded during America’s Gilded Age by inventor and entrepreneur George Eastman, has filed for Chapter 11.

Now investors and pundits are trying to figure out at what point the iconic company did itself in, and what — if anything — can be salvaged. Read more about Kodak’s bankruptcy filing.

One simple answer is that Kodak got fat and complacent relying too heavily on its highly profitable cash cow, the film business. That made it fearful and skeptical of what are now called disruptive new technologies, such as the digital camera, which one of its own engineers invented in 1975.

Kodak

Kodak’s Brownie camera, introduced in 1900, cost $1, and a roll of film was 15 cents. Its introduction brought amateur photography to the masses.

“They decided themselves at some point, ‘I no longer need to be in the innovation game,’ ” said Hal Gregersen, a professor of leadership at Insead, the global business school in France. When Kodak engineer Steve Sasson pitched an electronic camera to upper management, and they didn’t know what to do with it, Gregersen said, “they sealed the fate of the company.”

Years later, Sasson, who described his invention as a toaster-size prototype that took photos with a resolution of 0.01 megapixels, told the New York Times that Kodak’s management responded, “That’s cute but don’t tell anyone about it.”

The first cracks in Kodak’s world dominance of photography began to light when Fujifilm arrived in the U.S. in the late 1970s, and Kodak’s executives steadfastly refused to believe the Japanese giant would become a real competitor, even though it was selling film at lower prices.

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Does manufacturing matter?

While factories employ a lot less people than they did a half-century ago, there’s a case to be made that manufacturing output is still a key catalyst for the U.S. economy.

“Corporate failures are incremental,” said Gregersen. “Kodak had a complete corner on the market until Fuji came along. He said that when companies rely on the same business models for decades, “senior managers lose the capacity to discover the next business model.

“That happens because they stop engaging in the behavior to do something different.”

Gregerson, a co-author of “The Innovator’s DNA” with Clayton Christensen, said he sees this happen frequently at large companies too dependent upon one product and afraid to kill off their own very profitable children, as Apple Inc. /quotes/zigman/68270/quotes/nls/aapl AAPL -0.04% co-founder Steve Jobs was famous for a willingness to do. This business conundrum was famously explored and analyzed in Christensen’s best-selling “The Innovator’s Dilemma.”

“The fact that they couldn’t see what that [digital camera] might become reflects to me years, if not decades, of senior management behavior that disabled or incapacitated their ability to see,” he added. “That comes from leading a fairly insular life, not stepping out of the office.”

Current Kodak Chief Executive Antonio Perez made a full-on push to embrace digital photography when he was named CEO in 2005. But some analysts believe he also muddied the Rochester, N.Y., company’s focus by making an expensive gamble on consumer ink-jet and commercial printing.

In printing, Kodak still lags far behind the dominant Hewlett-Packard Co. /quotes/zigman/229301/quotes/nls/hpq HPQ +0.48% ), Perez’s former employer, with a market share in the single digits in the U.S. It doesn’t even show up in IDC’s third-quarter peripherals market research, except under the blanket category of “other.”

“Printers are a commodity,” Gregersen said. “If I were Kodak — where there is this rich, enormous history and brand — the question to ask is, ‘Do the senior people have an authentic, real connection to the people today taking pictures?’ ”

 

As an example, Gregersen pointed to Apple co-founder Jobs. As private as the late Jobs was, he lived in relative modesty compared with most CEOs, in a walkable — if pricey — neighborhood of Palo Alto, Calif. Jobs was also known to answer emails from customers and was occasionally spotted out in Silicon Valley, where some have recalled talking to him in line in stores.

“He was out looking at Cuisinart machines, but he also had that broader experience,” Gregersen said. “We laugh at the fact that he lived in India on an ashram and didn’t like the noise of a fan. But he used life experience that was not normal to create incredible products and services.”

Working with his other company, Pixar Animation Studios, now part of Disney /quotes/zigman/245568/quotes/nls/dis DIS +0.92% , also gave Jobs a much broader view and experience of another industry, entertainment.

Over the weekend, a conference of innovators called the Intersection was held at Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, Calif., where one of the themes was how innovation can come from learning about other industries and making connections among previously unrelated things.

Kodak, which invented the Brownie camera that popularized the field of photography for the masses, ironically missed one of the biggest shifts in consumer behavior: amateur photography with camera phones, and then “smartphones.”

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Kodak‘s lost focus

Kodak may become a fading memory as it files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Dow Jones's Steve McGrath explains where it went wrong and reminds us of previous corporations undone by technological disruption.

An example of how Kodak has lagged in recent years was seen at the Consumer Electronics Show last week. The company introduced a new feature on its Easyshare digital cameras with built-in WiFi. Consumers can now upload higher-res photos directly to social networks like Facebook — a feature that’s been available in smartphones for over a year.

In recent weeks, battling to stave off bankruptcy, the company had been looking to add cash to its operations, had sued rivals for intellectual property violations, and had tried to sell off some of its vast patent portfolio.

“There is little doubt that they have technology and IP of tremendous value,” said Anthony Sabino, a professor at St. John’s University’s business school, who applauded the company’s efforts to stay out of bankruptcy.

Gregersen, though, would argue that Kodak’s business model and path to innovation were long since bankrupt.