MANAGING CHANGE 300

QUESTION 1
Discuss the reason of Kodak’s failure in the “digital revolution” by evaluating the nature of the digital products market
Kodak is a 133 year old technology company, and was a world leading in camera film for decade. Today, Kodak is struggling as its facing bankruptcy, and the share price has fallen from as high as $94.75 per share in 1997 to as low as less than 30 cents per share in 2012. This happened as of due to the rise of competition in technology/camera industry, such as digital revolution, people are not using roll film anymore, people are using digital camera, even mobile phone has camera itself. Furthermore, Kodak is change slowly, does not agile, and quick enough.
Although Kodak was a leading brand in camera, and had huge image, but it is lacking on the simplicity, means people prefer using digital with memory card as their “film”, and also it is simple, because they do not have to buy the film as the old camera does.
In digital revolution, everything is changing. Not only technology, even newspaper and magazines affected, Kodak was one company that affected by digital revolution. However, Kodak does not respond to the changes, moreover Kodak tried to be an innovator in digital camera. Not only slow to change and adapt to change like competitors (Fujifilm, IBM) but also Eastman-kodak invested on digital printers and digital camera at the wrong time when the printing business in declining industry, which is worked. However, they did not have the competitive advantage and at that time there were a lot of competitors, for example Sony, Panasonic, dell and HP. Kodak also did not move on to particular business like mobile phones, laptop, tablets that was a very popular gadget at that time, they actually could combine the camera and the phone itself, but Kodak did not. Kodak has chance to merge but they did not do it,