>This type of thinking is what hurt Kodak ultimately I think. They invented the first digital camera, then scrapped it because they made money in film.
There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt.
Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)
This is all correct, but kinda shifting timelines.
For example, if Kodak had been first to digital, that doesn't mean they'd have had to give up any film at all. And since they were first, they could have set margins where they liked. Whether it would have survived and thrived...who knows. As others have pointed out, computers weren't commonplace back then.
Digital cameras did get commoditized, nearly 30 years after Kodak had invented it. So obviously, by today they'd had to have move on. High end sensors, glass, heck even cloud computing, something akin to Google Photos... there's no telling where they could have been if they'd have leaned in early.
That said, you point out the sensor market is 15 billion today... and Sony has about half. This is way, way more money than Kodak makes anymore. Today Kodak is at about a billion revenue per year.
In this context, it's sort of interesting to compare Google's approach of trying a million ideas, then killing the ones that don't take off or don't make money. Maybe that's how you stay ahead of the game and don't become a Kodak, which failed to sustain an experimental new business for long enough. Google takes quite a lot of shit for this approach (understandably).
But are any of Google's side projects an existential threat to their main business of search / ads in the way that digital cameras were to film for Kodak?
There is nowhere near as much money to be made in the digital camera market. They failed to adapt, but at the same time, there was no saving what was an immensely large company even if they did adapt.
Film revenue for Kodak was $16 billions in 1996, adjusted for inflation that would be $30 billions, that number will make anything digital look like nothing (15 billions is the current revenue for the entirety of the digital sensor market in current dollars and Sony has 43% of that pie, a share that has been dropping as more competitors have entered the market and as Samsung kept improving.). You see a Sony sensor in many phones, but Sony doesn't make anywhere near film-era Kodak revenue on that side of their business. The higher end camera business is more profitable, but it doesn't sell much in volume, and the low end of the camera business has almost disappeared because of smartphones. (Canon, the biggest producer of digital cameras, has all but ceased making compact cameras apart from their G7X model. You can still find other models on the market but they're older unsold stock and refurbs. They also announced they would stop producing new DSLRs and will solely focus on making a narrow range of mirrorless cameras. To put it bluntly, the digital camera market is in a very unhealthy state. Don't solely look at price tags either, Leica for example makes some of the most expensive cameras on the market but.. their revenue is $400 millions, not even $1B)