Eastman Kodak

4) What advice would you offer John Chambers in managing Cisco’s culture through the transition?

3. What are the challenges that Swan faces at the end of the case? What actions should she take? Should she assign an interim director?

Introduced in the year of 1952, the “Brownie 127” camera was created in England by Eastman Kodak’s Kodak Ltd. With a simple design, and affordable price for the customers and a catchy slogan “You push the button, we do the rest,” the Brownie became popular for amateur photography. This plastic box camera shoots eight 4x6 cm pictures on a 127 film. A 127 film is a rollfilm created for still photography. From the first release of the “Brownie 127”, over a million sold.

In his lifetime, George Eastman once said, “Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it. But above all, know light.

When Anne was appointed as the new CEO of one of Americas most successful Corporations, she was the difference between survival and filing for bankruptcy. This was a lot for Anne considering the fact that she was just thrown in there without much knowledge or understanding on what needed to be done. But, instead of walking away from the company that gave her so much, she stepped up to the plate and planned to lead Xerox through the “perfect storm.”

Kodak and Polaroid are both extremely different firms. Polaroid has only one specialization and that is the instant photo market. Kodak on the other hand has reaches in all photo related industries. Kodak had high fixed costs due to their in-house production while Polaroid opted to be flexible and loose by subcontracting most of its production facilities. Therefore, Kodak had to reach a certain level of market volume in order to break even and become profitable. Polaroid, on the other hand, had huge R&D cost that was an impediment to break-even point. This difference in strategy was an incentive that gave Kodak its reasoning for aggressive maneuvers in the market to weed out Polaroid. It wanted its economies of scale to be

Company Eastman Kodak is currently the market leader in the photo film market. The company has continued its domination of the photo film market, but in the past 5 years its market share has eased from 76% to 70%. Reason mainly being the competitors like Fuji Photo Film Co. and Konica Corp. lured consumers with their lower-priced versions. In 1993, Kodak spent an estimated $50 million on camera and film supply advertising in the United States; this was about 4 times its

Diagnosis of the reasons for Kodak's market share loss and assessment of likely development of the market if Kodak maintained the status quo.

Kodak should have leveraged its numerous patented technologies to gain the first mover advantage in digital photography, instead of waiting until 1990s to release its first digital camera. In the early adoption stage, Kodak should have strongly emphasized on product development and manufacturing capabilities for a first generation, cost-effective, and marketable digital camera irrespective of its quality and appeal to their consumers. Kodak was slow to adopt this new technological change

Acting in this quick manner to find all of the ways that they were able to profit out of their old business, move into the digital age successfully, and find other product lines that the company could offer was the key difference that management made for Fujifilm’s success over Kodak’s decline.

Eastman Kodak Company (KODK) Ownership Summary gives a preview of institutional property and action for a specific stock. The institutional possessions rundown information includes the property and change from latest 13F filings. The insider filer information tallies the quantity of month to month positions more than 3 month and 12 month time compasses. Outline information is ascertained day by day, utilizing the most forward data accessible.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of staying with Kodak—or changing suppliers? How would you evaluate these? Staying with Kodak you already know what you are getting and have a long term relationship already. The only thing is that you are staying with the highest price company per the case study.

Fujifilm’s management on the other hand was quick to adapt to the changing market conditions. By creating a plan that allowed them to continue what they were doing in the film camera industry for as long as possible, and to start moving over to the digital camera industry to keep forward and looking outside of their normal consumer market for other ways to stay in the eyes of the consumers. One of the most important moves that Fujifilm made was staying with what they already knew they were good at and began learning how to adapt it to other markets arenas.

Since 1983, Kodak made many attempts that were mainly designed to get into the digital line of business. Nonetheless they wanted to do it in their own way with their organizational traditions(Gavetti, Henderson & Giorgi , 2005). The high margins of the film industry in the past and the worry of the innovations’ compatibility with the company’s tradition made Kodak be hesitant to make the decision of rapid transformation and taking up new ways to do things, which meant that the Kodak indeed had the problem of cognitive inertia. On the premise of this fatal judgment, the strategies employed by the hired CEO to take a lead in the development of the firm’s digital products utilized tactics that led the company to suffer losses. The tactics statement made by George Fisher(tenure:1993-1999), who was the first outsider to run Kodak, showed the first step to Kodak’s failure. With his experience at Motorola, Fisher thought of the photography and imaging business from the electronics sides(Gavetti, Henderson & Giorgi , 2005). He wanted to make use of the languished digital programs developed in the Kodak’s laboratories, while this thought was not been able to realize because Kodak was not enterprising enough to follow the inadequate clamor for change. The executives should have admitted the coming of digital time, while they were not interested in giving up a commodity that it had been developed for such a long time. The company took the razor-blade model that Kodak sold cheap cameras(e.g. disposal cameras), while the films were expensive and hoped its customers would continue to pay for the films，which actually just made the company drift deeper and deeper into its traditional industry.

Factors within the internal context that accelerates Kodak’s downfall is the lack of knowledge. A very good example is that Kodak had invested $5.1 billion dollar to acquire Sterling Drug Inc. in its pursuance for business diversification (Feder, 1988) but only to realise later that hormonal agents and cardiovascular drugs is different from chemically treated photo and had sold Sterling Drug Inc. in pieces for half the original price Kodak had paid (Mui, 2012).