Dear Kodak,
In Act 1 you were the undisputed king of film. From Hollywood to Bollywood, some of the greatest movies ever made were captured on Kodak film. So too were some of the worst atrocities committed against humanity. You gave us the escape we needed during the worst of times, pricked our consciousnesses and changed the policies of governments during the best of times. Rock stars wrote songs about you. You shared our most cherished memories.
Then, in Act 2, you invented the digital camera. Huh? What the hell were you thinking? Did you expect that to end well? I know that Americans aren’t, as a rule, big on irony, but I hear that if you look up irony in the next edition of Webster’s, it will say “See ‘Kodak Moment’.”
Act Three opened with you filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Quelle surprise. But what’s the Denouement? Do you Produce a Kodak Digital Instamatic, that’s so simple, inexpensive, and social that iPhoneography becomes soooo 2011? Hook up with Lomo, ensuring that everyone who buys into Holga, Diana and Lomography, also buys into Kodak film and processing? Create a social network for Kodak film and digital instamatic users that’s hipper than Instagram, lomography.com, Vimeo & Flickr put together? Carpet bomb every school, college and university that runs a photography or filmmaking course with free film, paper and chemicals, until a whole generation is hooked on traditional photographic media? Build a better digital sensor and license it to everyone from Nikon to Apple?
NO? So how then do you save the company?
Printers? LOL! No really, what’s your big plan? Wait a minute, you’re serious? You’re going to ignore your USP and instead find salvation in an oversaturated market, dominated by computer and electronics giants who, by leveraging their existing business are able to achieve lower manufacturing costs and better margins than you?
What’s your marketing message? Is it that Kodak printers are better than the competition? That they produce more vivid, lifelike prints that last for longer? No? Your marketing message is that it’s cheaper to print on a Kodak printer than on any other?
So what you’re saying is that Kodak is cheap? It will be soon, if that’s your big plan!
Here’s a newsflash, however cheap it may be to print photos on a Kodak printer, it is cheaper to put them online. Here’s another newsflash, We’re about enter a world in which smartphone displays, television sets, computer monitors and digital photo frames all out-resolve print. In this world, do you really see the market for printers expanding? And on the increasingly rare occasions that people feel a memory is so important, so cherished that it merits a print, do you really think the first question they’ll ask is “How cheap can I be?”
No company should ever be ‘too big to fail’, but occasionally a company is too important to fail and you are. You are the heritage of everyone that ever used or will use a camera, from the greatest director, to the proudest parent. You are Film’s last best hope. Without you the world will be a culturally impoverished place. So take a good hard look at what Ilford, FujiFilm and The Impossible Project have been doing over the past few years and if you still don’t get it, then perhaps it’s time to sell your photographic assets and expertise to someone who can do a better job with them…like the former board of Olympus…
Yours truly,
Paul D.
© 2012, Paul D. All rights reserved.
