His words were ringing in my ears when I turned on the computer this morning and read about Kodak’s bankruptcy. Shocking (and sad) as it might be, it is not all that surprising. People have been watching the company’s slow free fall for years. The Economist has a great rundown of what went wrongat the company — I recommend you read that and skip all the news-y nonsense – and my key takeaway from that wonderful piece: you cannot fight the future.

Companies that once were large and massive and failed to adjust to the new reality have been left behind.  Xerox that owned the photocopying industry is now a small player in what was essentially its core competency —  document management. AT&T used to be a giant wireline phone company that controlled how we communicated with each other. Now it is a cellphone provider and only a component of the way we communicate. Why? Because communication itself has since moved on to a new kind of network and isn’t limited by per-minute billing.

No coming back

Kodak Logo: through the ages

As my friend Pip Coburn says, turnarounds never turn. Kodak has been in restructuring mode for 15 years – cutting headcount, closing factories, tightening belts and squeezing rocks for blood. In other words — the company isn’t fat in a traditional sense.  But why none of its strategies worked was  because the company took too long and sat on its duff watching digital photography come and eat it for a mid-day snack even though Kodak R&D helped with the digital photo revolution when it launched the first digital camera in 1975.

And yet they failed to do what one of their major competitors – FujiFilm did — embrace digital with both arms and is now thriving. And when Kodak finally did embrace digital in 1993 it did with hesitance that comes when companies are afraid to cannibalize their existing businesses for the sake of the future. 

Today Kodak is experimenting with printers, commercial printing and other services as new ways to grow, but one wonders if that will be the path forward. I am pretty sure HP, Cannon and Lexmark have something to say about Kodak’s printing ambitions. And even if it succeeds and survives, it won’t be the Kodak of George Eastman. We might as well call it, a Corporation-Once-Known-As-Kodak!

Kodak, like many other businesses that have failed before it, made one fatal mistake – it forgot the true purpose of its business and instead focused on features, SKUs and products. (I have written about this before.) Kodak continued to define itself by “film” when all it should have done is define itself with “photos” or moments.

Who cared if the photos were on a slide, were printed and placed in albums, in digital cameras or on online sharing services. “The Kodak Moment” is what made that company powerful. Had it looked at the world from that lens it would be been an easy decision to adapt to new technologies and adopt them for benefit of their customers – us! In Mad Men, Don Draper tells the guys from Eastman Kodak when giving a pitch for their slide carousel:

This device isn’t a spaceship. It’s a time machine. It goes backwards, forwards. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It’s not called the Wheel. It’s called a Carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around, and back home again… to a place where we know we are loved.

Nokia’s Kodak Moment?

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop

There are many lessons for today’s companies in Kodak’s failure to adapt and eventual bankruptcy. Is Nokia the next Kodak? I hope not – for I like those guys – but Nokia is a likely candidate. Just as Kodak’s internal team was arguing for a digital shift that the top guys ignored, Nokia too, ignored all protestations from its resident experts who argued for an Internet-centric, touch-based and app-driven mobile device. Anyone remember the Nokia 770?

That phone could have been Nokia’s future, instead it is forgotten.  Nokia defined itself by a certain kind of a product – the 12-key phone. People at Nokia talked about a multimedia mobile computer, but it couldn’t look beyond those 12 keys. It took Apple and Google to show Nokia how to re-imagine the phone. In doing so they have defined how hundreds of millions view and what they expect from a smartphone. As I have said before – it is too late for the Finnish company.

Sure, Nokia has a brand, global presence and a sizeable marketshare. So did Kodak. It took 132 years, the last 15 of those spent in constant belt tightening, for the photo film company to sink. Having missed the big wave, Nokia doesn’t have the luxury of time.

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AMOLED displays may be in relatively short supply nowadays, but Samsung is doing its best to bridge the gap. Today, the company’s Mobile Display unit announced that its 5.5th-generation AMOLED production line is now open, some two months ahead of schedule. The line uses glass substrates that are substantially larger than those found in its existing factories, allowing Samsung to increase output, while lowering costs. This increase in production comes in response to growing demand for the Galaxy S II and an AMOLED market that, according to DisplaySearch, should triple in value this year to .26 billion. For now, the production line is focusing on smartphone displays, since that’s where demand is growing fastest, but will eventually turn its attention to tablet PC displays, as well. The new factory assembling the displays can currently churn out about three million screens per month, but is capable of ramping that up to 30 million, at full capacity. No word yet on when it will achieve this rate, but if SMD continues to boost its output, we may even see that market surplus we’ve been hearing about.

Samsung’s new AMOLED production line should help ease smartphone display shortages originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 31 May 2011 07:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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That all seems trivial, of course, given that more than 27,000 people in Northeastern Japan are dead or missing and the country is widening its evacuation zone, all while recovering from relentless aftershocks, including one that hit yesterday. Still, the domino effect of a strangled supply chain remains relevant to us as tech journalists, particularly if a scarcity in materials has the potential to drive up prices — and affect as many kinds of products as we think it will.

Sharp suspends production at its two largest LCD factories following Japanese quake originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Apr 2011 16:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM held a BlackBerry WebWorks developer event in San Francisco this evening, and while hard news was not in attendance, we did score a number of tidbits about the company’s BlackBerry PlayBook. First and foremost, there’s most definitely a portrait virtual keyboard in the latest QNX tablet build, and we literally gave it a spin, watching as the landscape layout slowly switched to portrait mode as we changed the slate’s orientation. Second, we may have gotten our first hint about what RIM’s doing with the recently-purchased TAT — we overheard that the PlayBook’s bezel gestures actually aren’t quite finalized yet, and that the astonishingly silent UI design division may be lending a hand. On the all-important subject of battery life we don’t have much to add beyond earlier boasts, but a staffer did tell us that RIM’s shooting for a “full work day” of juice. Last but not least, we were told that Jim Balsillie’s module cavity certainly exists, but it’s not the user-upgradable slot or socket we’d hoped — rather, it’s a orifice deep inside the PlayBook for hardware enhancements at the factories where devices are built. Like this one, perhaps? Video after the break.

Continue reading RIM tilts BlackBerry PlayBook keyboard on side, drops hints about TAT, module cavities and battery life

RIM tilts BlackBerry PlayBook keyboard on side, drops hints about TAT, module cavities and battery life originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The linkage system is the component which converts motion of the electric motor into the action of the windscreen wipers across the screen. The worm gear is a strangely named device but gets its label from its form which looks like a straight bar which is threaded along its length by a helical structure. This worm gear comes with it the feature to multiply the output or torque of the electric motor by massive amounts and at the same time decreasing the output by a huge amount. It is this component which renders the whole windscreen wipers housing possible converting the output of the electric motor into stuff practical to power the windscreen wipers. This part is converted to the linkage system which translated the windscreen wipers back and fourth in a chastened motion over the wind screen glass. When the windscreen wipers reaches it’s lowest altitude a simple electronic device senses this and shuts off the power to the replacement wiper blades.

In this way the wipers are always reduced in the down position away from the windscreen so as not to block the driver’s precious vision. A cam shaft is then fixed to the worm gear and this cog turns in time with the output of the electronic motor and the worm gear. The cam turns and is attached to a shaft with is basically a long stick and as the cog or cam shaft rotates the long stick or rod is actuated forward and back. This rod is then fixed to another which actuates the wipers machine on the passenger side as well as the driver’s side. The wipers technique itself has a few options, one it can be operated in tandem as described above or alternatively just a lone wipers can be placed in the centre of the wind screen. The result of this approach will then undergo some form of quality control testing by a skilled professional who will make sure they are operating in recommended parameters. These if successful can then be boxed up and sent to retail outlets and car makers, the waster from this enterprise can often be sold on again as scrap which is nice news for the environment. Currently in this writers opinion the best featured wipers today are made from silicone and can be bought online for large discounts.

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