The end of Kodachrome

[footfootfoot]

Kodak is still dead to me, and long before digital became a reality Kodak was still fucking up what was great, trying to figure out ways to squeeze an extra scintilla of silver out of a roll of film ending up with crap and then spending a small fortune on advertising trying to get us to believe it was raining when they pissed on our shoes.

I still predict that Kodak will be extinct in 10 or 20 years.

They won't sell or share the patents and info and equipment they no longer use.

At one point they tried to force the chemists who made their Infra Red film into early retirement only to discover that you couldn't take some fresh faced young grad form RIT and hand him the recipe and expect him to make it work. They ended up having a huge shortage until they could entice their old chemists back and then they still had to eliminate a few emulsions.

They are fuck ups in my book.

[tw]

Originally Posted by footfootfoot

At one point they tried to force the chemists who made their Infra Red film into early retirement only to discover that you couldn't take some fresh faced young grad form RIT and hand him the recipe and expect him to make it work. They ended up having a huge shortage until they could entice their old chemists back and then they still had to eliminate a few emulsions.

Your entire post can be summed up in the only reason why. What is taught in business schools.

Polaroid had a list of opportunities so long that it should be considered a disaster like 11 September. For example, digital paper was too little too late. They eventually sold the technology off. One of so many attempts, too little too late, included Zink and Oynx. Due to so business school graduates that routinely stifle innovation, Zink was not developed until 2001. Only because even business school graduates finally realized they had to innovate.

Once Dr Land stopped innovating, Polaroid was doing nothing more to advance mankind.

What is a Polaroid camera? A copier machine. And a printer. Advanced optics and graphical recognitions were other wide open opportunities for a company who also pioneers how human vision works. Obvious next steps - except to bean counters.

Meanwhile another nearby east coast company was also being as anti-American as Polaroid. Xerox. The HP All-In-One printers on every desktop is what Xerox should have been doing twenty years earlier. And could not because the east coast is dominated by business school graduates.

HP is the definition of a patriotic company. Their original market was tone (sound) generators for highest tech companies. Then moved into electronic test equipment that only the richest companies could need. Then moved into other completely new markets including hospital equipment, GPS (in the 1970s long before anyone heard of them), oscilloscopes (what TV companies would have developed if being innovative), power supplies, and computers. HP developed integrated circuits, microprocessors, and was a world leader in LEDs. Then into calculators and wrist watches. Then those 400 pound computers started becoming so small as to be desktop machines. They even took over every market that DEC once dominated.

HP moved into networking and office equipment. HP now does what Xerox and Polaroid both should have been doing if they were patriotic American. DIX - the three companies that developed Ethernet: Dec, Intel, and Xerox. Instead Xerox, Polaroid, etc were myopic as any business school graduate would be. That is where cancer originates.

An engineer or scientist does today what takes four or ten years later to appear on spread sheets. Therefore engineers and scientists are an expense; not an asset. In companies using a communism taught in business schools, then product people must be cost controlled. Which is why Kodak had the digital camera almost a decade before anyone else. And business school graduates could not measure its value on the spread sheets.

Because of their communism, they saw Kodak as the world's largest consumer of silver. That proved only business school graduates where making Kodak profitable. Higher profits due to larger cash flows. No business school disciple can understand something innovative. A definition of a business school graduate.

Innovation stifled for the same reason that GM did not sell the engine they developed over 30 years earlier. That same engine was inside every American patriotic car since the early 1990s. And still not in all GM cars in 2005. These are not accidents. These stifled innovations are what business schools preach.

Innovation cannot be measured on any spread sheet until long after that innovation is obsolete. Only those brainwashed in business school philosophies would not understand that. Most of the 'brainwashed' did not even go to business school. I would speculate that a majority reading this are also that brainwashed.

Polaroid was chock full of potential new products - and did nothing. Remember their self-focusing camera - the SLR680 and Sonar One Step? Today, that technology is found even on rear bumpers of many cars. Is an entire industry in automating factories. Polaroid pioneered the technology. But with management educated in business schools, it could not do what HP still routinely does every decade since before WWII. Or ditto for Cisco and Amazon. Other companies that thrive because business school graduates and another type of anti-American - stock brokers - are not obstructing them.

[Lamplighter]

TW, where do you get all your info !
It's great that you can post so much here

FWIW, I do remember the SLR680, but I think that was a "newer" model of the folding Polaroids.
I was so fascinated by the Polaroid cameras when they first appeared I went out and bought two !
But I think my mine were model SZ-70 (???)

My light bulb idea was to rent out the cameras for people's parties or whatever.
Being in grad school I was looking for any non-labor way to make extra $.
Nothing ever came of a business. I learned I am not a business person.
And my wife has never let me forget the $200
that used to gather dust in the bottom desk drawer.
Unfortunately a few years ago there was no more film available for them,
and they were given/thrown away...
I don't even remember them going.

But they were truely a great innovation at the time.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Lamplighter

But I think my mine were model SZ-70 (???)

I think the SX-70(?) was an SLR that predated Polaroid's Sonar camera.

A business (that does passport pictures) were down to their last packets of Polaroid film. Would have to dispose of a perfectly good camera since nobody makes that film. Would replace the Polaroid with a new Sony to do same instant pictures.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Say what you will, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart, and a hard spot in my pants, for Polaroid.

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Say what you will, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart, and a hard spot in my pants, for Polaroid.

Dr Land was a major innovator and researcher. He pioneered research on how brains do vision. For example, he discovered you can read the text or see the color. But cannot do both.

They could not understand how one section worked until someone walked across the room. Suddenly that brain part went active. Why do cats jump into leaves, then stop? Cat's vision cannot see a mouse until the mouse moves. A part that detects motion is different and better developed than another part that sees shapes. Research done by the same guy who also developed a most famous Polaroid Land Camera.

Early Polaroids came with a chemical stick to coat the film after a picture developed. Early Polaroids would literally develop a picture while watching. In its day, that was a thrill. Then you sealed that picture with a chemical (that smelled unique).

Polaroid was how we solved strange problems with spacecraft electronics. A Polaroid camera was attached to an oscilloscope to record a single trace. Today, electronics do same using digital memory. Electronics also replaced film for that function.