Post #235,103
11/19/05 11:03:33 AM
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Not that I care...but looking at history...
who thought Eastern, Delta, TWA, Pan Am in the 1970 seventies would be threatened (and in some cases beaten) by a company called SouthWest?
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Post #235,105
11/19/05 11:10:31 AM
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Good point. But they're selling a service, not a Thing.
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Post #235,120
11/19/05 12:28:36 PM
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Kodak sold things. They're hurting pretty badly.
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
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Post #235,137
11/19/05 2:02:30 PM
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But thats a different beast
Kodak bet their future that film would survive...and didn't realize they were wrong until much too late.
And they also didn't invent their successor technology.
If you push something hard enough, it will fall over. Fudd's First Law of Opposition
[link|mailto:bepatient@aol.com|BePatient]
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Post #235,145
11/19/05 3:13:51 PM
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Again, read the book.
It is easy to pass such facile judgements. It is much harder for the company involved to do anything about them.
I'd be willing to bet that Kodak knew that digital was coming, explored it in their labs, and made a sincere attempt to get on the bandwagon. Lemme google...looks like I'd win my bet. According to [link|http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/kodakHistory/1990_1999.shtml|this history], Kodak was selling 1.3 megapixel cameras in 1991!) And they were one of the early innovators in digital imagining. This didn't help them at all.
This isn't an isolated example. Christensen found that CEOs at the losing companies knew long before it happened what bandwagon they needed to be on and tried to do something about it. But there are basic organizational challenges that make this an exercise in swimming upstream, and he only found one CEO who had faced disruptive innovation and managed to force the company to switch. And that CEO said that, had he known how hard it would be, he wouldn't have bothered.
Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
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Post #235,148
11/19/05 3:20:21 PM
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I will actually. Looks interesting
even if I may not agree
If you push something hard enough, it will fall over. Fudd's First Law of Opposition
[link|mailto:bepatient@aol.com|BePatient]
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Post #235,221
11/20/05 11:52:14 AM
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Organization learning....
part of the reason the organization as a whole can't make these radically changes is that by and large it's leaders have been promoted under the old system. Everything they know, what they can do, will be rendered worthless if they (as an organization) change.
Take Kodak...it's middle managers (and upper managers) knew film. They'd lived and breathed it for their entire lives. They can possibly acknowledge that digital is coming and what they know is going to be worthless.
They cannot acknowledge that the kid down the hall knows what it necessary to keep the company in business over the next few decades.
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Post #235,225
11/20/05 12:22:31 PM
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And that is reinforced...
by the fact that at all points the customers that the company has contact with (and knows how to contact) prefer film. And at all points the people who work with film have better economic opportunities. (Larger sales, higher profits, all stuff that is hard to ignore.)
This is why the only successful strategy for disruptive innovations seems to be to start a spin-off, and then after the disruptive wave is well established, re-merge. However even with that you have to be careful - you can't subsidize the spin-off very much. If it is subsidized, then it becomes dependent on the subsidy and will find it hard to succeed.
The Innovator's Solution has more to say about this, but it boils down to the maxim, "Good money is impatient for profit but patient for growth. Bad money is impatient for growth but patient for profit."
Cheers,
Ben
I have come to believe that idealism without discipline is a quick road to disaster, while discipline without idealism is pointless. -- Aaron Ward (my brother)
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Post #235,227
11/20/05 12:43:34 PM
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It's not so black and white.
So to speak. :-)
As Ben's link above points out, Kodak has been doing digital photography for years and they still do. They also still do film.
Part of Kodak's problems were due to heavy competition from [link|http://internationalecon.com/fairtrade/fairpapers/ddaniels.html|Fuji]. Whether the competition was fair or otherwise, I can't say. There was also the expensive battle with Polaroid in the 1980s over instant cameras.
But Kodak is still around, and according to [link|http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/annualReport04/financials.shtml|this] they had $13.5B in sales and 55,000 employees in 2004. They did have a big restructuring charge, but they're not in horrible shape.
A better example of a company that was done in by digital imaging was [link|http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20050427-1329-polaroid-bankruptcy.html|Polaroid]. E.g. almost no-one uses film for microscope or oscilloscope cameras any more. And you don't see camera phones that spit out polariods. ;-) Their [link|http://www.dpreview.com/news/0110/01101201polaroidch11.asp|stock price] went from $60.31 to $0.28 in a little over 4 years. Digital photography ate Polaroid and resulted in its bankruptcy. (Yes, a company called [link|http://www.polaroid.com|Polaroid] exists now, with some of the same products, but it's not the same entity. It was purchased for its brand name (they sell TVs and DVD players too now)).
Cheers,
Scott.
(Who seems to be in a contrary mood on this topic. :-)
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