The big news could've been terrible. Kodak has had a rough couple years / decades. For all we know, that tweet implied the final nail in the coffin for Kodak.
The surprising part of this story for me was that Kodak is still trading. I thought they were dead and buried years ago, no nails left for that coffin.
I went to a Kodak Developers Conference in 2001. Even back then it was obvious they were struggling to find a way to remain relevant in a digital age. It struck me then that they were doomed, since their business was built on getting a cut from every picture taken. Nothing in digital was ever going to replicate that revenue stream.
Kodak invented the first self-contained digital camera in 1975.
"Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer who invented the first digital camera in 1975, characterized the initial corporate response to his invention this way:
But it was filmless photography, so management’s reaction was, ‘that’s cute—but don’t tell anyone about it.’"
Which in it's own way reflects even worse on them as a company.
Kodak was indeed an important player in the early digital age. But I think they made a mistake in thinking they could pivot to a 'similar' business model instead of making the hard choices to really change.
By the mid 80s with the advent of the VCR in people's homes it should have been obvious that their business model was not sustainable long term. Heck, Sony's original Mavica was from the first half of the 80s!
Something to consider about most of the camera makers that have managed to survive; most had SLR brands, and Lens lines to go with them. Kodak, on the other hand, focused mostly on 'point and shoot' type cameras where accessories and future revenue generation is nonexistent (except, of course, film and those disposable flashes...)
I remember Kodak's whole schtick with the photo printers, paper, and whatnot. The cameras themselves weren't bad. What went wrong (again, IMO) is that they missed that the writing was already on the wall for printing photos. By the mid 90s, PDAs were becoming a thing, Laptop computers and larger color LCDs were becoming more and more usable, Cell phones, while not ubiquitous, certainly were real technology.
While this is said with the benefit of hindsight, but I do wonder if anyone there considered that as soon as display and mobile technology improved enough to warrant printing photos not worth the time/effort, their new model would have fallen apart.
Emphasizing the point and shoot cameras made perfect sense for Kodak, because it encouraged people to take more pictures and they made their money on the pictures. Same reason Google encourages everyone to use the web.
In 2001 it was obvious that they were pinning their hopes on everyone still printing pictures. The technologies they were pushing were related to printing, but they couldn't see that printing was a dead end.
