A lot of companies even larger than Kodak have emerged from bankruptcy though.
It's just a sign that old management methods have failed and time to change.
The problem is once something becomes a commodity, it's hard to make profit from there. I am going to be very curious to see what happens to the iphone brand in a decade. Once it would have been impossible to imagine the "walkman" brand to fade away.
yes but 'Walkman' or 'iPhone' aren't the only products made by their respective companies, and they keep trying new stuff.
Kodak is dead because they rode the analog film horse into the ground and never realized they needed to diversify and leverage their brand into something new and better for the next 50 years.
Kodak hasn't been a film-company for years, and in fact they still lead the industry in many ways. For example, look at the market for high-end medium format digital sensors, Kodak is still at the top of that heap. Of course, the market for $20K digital backs is... pretty small.
Kodak's strategy in the digital age was try to become a technology broker, and let others tackle transforming this tech into actual end product - but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that your licensees and customers will eventually vertically integrate and push you out entirely. Canon built their own sensors, Sony got into the sensors game and pushed Kodak completely out of the consumer sensor realm, and between those two Kodak's doom was all but sealed.
Instead, their consumer-level efforts focused on stupid, low-margin, technologically simple wares like inkjet printers and digital photo frames, all lowest-common-denominator product categories where Kodak didn't have a significant technological edge against its competitors.
Kodak invented the digital camera, but they completely dropped the ball. They needed to ship their own cameras.
It's just a sign that old management methods have failed and time to change.
The problem is once something becomes a commodity, it's hard to make profit from there. I am going to be very curious to see what happens to the iphone brand in a decade. Once it would have been impossible to imagine the "walkman" brand to fade away.