Photo Gallery The Eternal Moment
For decades, Kodak was at the heart of all the world's images. Company founder George Eastman was hailed as the Steve Jobs of his era, and Kodak was its Google.
The Kodak factory in Rochester, New York. The company filed for bankruptcy protection on Jan. 19. "Did I cry?" Shanebrook asks. "No. Was I shocked? Yes. And I still haven't recovered from it."
For decades, Kodak was everywhere, producing everything from film for cameras to film for X-ray photography to 35mm movie stock. Between 1928 and 2008, every single movie to win the Oscar for best film was shot on Kodak stock.
The company even developed the camera that would capture images of the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon, delivering one of the greatest "Kodak Moments" of all time -- pictures of the first men on the moon and of our planet seen from space.
How did Kodak miss the dawn of the digital era? It was actually Kodak that developed the world's first digital camera, but in the end it was unable to keep up. One by one, Canon, Sony, Nikon and all the other camera manufacturers overtook Kodak. Their products were just as good or better, and they looked nicer, more colorful and fresher.
In an internal company report made more than 30 years ago, a company official summarized the prospects for digital photography in a series of rapidly rising exponential graphs. The graphs showed that all products Kodak had been successful at selling -- film, photos and cameras -- would switch from analog to digital by 2010 at the latest.
The world as Kodak knew it was destined to vanish, and its business would shrink to practically nothing: Almost overnight, Kodak found itself heading down what seemed like a one-way street to oblivion.
Management hopes Kodak can become successful again with printers, but that doesn't seem all that convincing because Kodak has always been about pictures. No matter how wonderful they've been, all stories have to end. And perhaps that's also sometimes the case with companies, as well.
