Tell me that this simple idea has never occurred to anyone at Kodak:
If the company that calls itself Kodak today had a brain, it would copy the “Instamatic 100” from Kodak’s greatest hits, drop a first rate lens in it, add some great chips, a view screen as big as the back of the camera, and rebrand it as the “Kodak Digimatic 100.” Instant win.
They’ll never be cool enough to do it. Somewhere in the 1990s, Kodak lost the ability to design and innovate. Once the king of the camera world, Kodak’s now just the place where bad designs and worse marketing go to die. Today, Kodak needs a brain the same way Scarecrow needed one in the first reel of “Wizard of Oz.” Like Scarecrow, there’s a long brick road awinding into the land of its dreams.
It wasn’t always that way. There was a time when it seemed that everyone in America owned an Instamatic. It was a camera that, in its simplicity, elegance and rock-bottom cost, was an icon of its age
Of course, doing it now would be far too late: this was a winning strategy for 2001, not 2011. If they do it now, it’ll flop because they’ve squandered all the immense goodwill that used to be associated with the company name. It was the “everyman” camera and film: professionals had their specialized cameras and even more specialized film, but everyone else just bought Kodak. Kodak was “good enough”, dependable, predictable.
It takes immense lack of talent to fumble that much potential so thoroughly and so consistently. Almost a genius level of anti-talent at the corporate level.
