It is needless to say an irony, as many journalists have rightly pointed out, that the company that had first invented the digital imaging sensor more than thirty-five years ago, would become the victim of its own creation. Ever since the advent of the digital camera, nobody ever uses Kodak film anymore.
Today Kodak does make digital cameras but they are simply not earning much money from them, in a very competitive market with constantly shrinking margins. Simply put, the Taiwanese and Japanese can make better digital cameras for cheaper anyway. And of course, the same goes with small inkjet photo printers. These will never bring Kodak back to its former profitability.
So what's Kodak to do now? for one, they ought to start with an honest look at why it is they failed to recognize in advance that they would end up in this very situation and, more importantly, why they failed to act when they finally did realize the problem they were running into. In this respect, they should probably follow The Economist and compare their fate to the evolution during the same period of time of their main Japanese competitor, Fujifilm. Unlike their American rival, Fujifilm have successfully managed to engineer a transition from producing photographic film to diversifying into other areas of chemistry and electronics.
At this point it is unfortunately doubtful that there is much that Kodak can do to avoid falling into oblivion and being broken up and sold in pieces. Or at the very least, the company that will emerge from the bankruptcy proceeding will be but a pale image of the original Kodak.
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