On Aug 9, 2010, at 9:55 AM, Stephen Russell wrote:
>>> Kodak stopped making slide film. STOP THE WORLD! What is this
>>> business doing to those photographers?
>>
>> It amazes me how you consistently present backwards analogies. Kodak
>> didn't abandon photographers; photographers abandoned Kodak (and film in
>> general). Kodak actually tried to keep the film business alive, and lost a
>> lot of money as a result. Hardly what I would call analogous behavior to
>> Microsoft.
> --------------------
>
> It is every thing similar and not at all different. M$ stopped making
> new versions of said product. Kodak stopped making unexposed film.
> Both companies expected to receive profits from continued production
> of either software or film. When the cost of production became out of
> sync with the profits decisions were made. How are these not at all
> similar?
Kodak did not go out and actively lie about their commitment to film
production. They did not give talks at photographic conferences promising that
you can switch from film to digital and back seamlessly. They did not hire
teams of film engineers to create the next generation of film, and promote
those hires with press releases and community events. Microsoft did all of
these things regarding the DLR.
Instead, Kodak had been saying for years that their film business was
struggling, and that it would be discontinued at some point. So far they've
dropped Kodachrome, which, while perhaps the most famous film type thanks to
Paul Simon, was the smallest in terms of sales, and the most expensive and
difficult to process - do you know that for the last few years that there has
only been one place on Earth to process Kodachrome film (and it isn't Kodak)?
Kodak would have loved nothing more than to continue to make film, and
the profits that go with it. Instead, they've seen the market shrink to a tiny
percentage of what it was just a decade ago. When was the last time you saw
someone using a film camera?
The market for the DLR, OTOH, was growing, thanks in no small part to
Microsoft's active push to attract developers to it. Their decision to abandon
their DLR development was certainly not driven by a dying market that
developers were abandoning, as is the case with Kodak's film market. Instead,
it seems much more like the abandonment of the Visual FoxPro market: lots of
enthusiastic developers that they felt were now "caught", and the desire to
move them into higher-profit, more restrictively-licensed tools.
-- Ed Leafe
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