The Camera That Kodak Wouldn't Sell (2026)

Episode guide

Kodak did not overlook digital photography. Its engineers built the first self-contained digital camera in 1975, and Steven Sasson and Robert Hills produced a much more capable digital SLR in 1989. 1 2 The harder decision was commercial: whether to let digital replace the film economics that funded Kodak's business. 3

This episode reconstructs that decision without turning it into a single mythical veto. It follows the objections from marketing and business executives, the technical dissent already inside Kodak, and the company's partial digital response. 1 4 It then follows the company's eventual Chapter 11 filing in 2012. 5

The argument

The episode's counterfactual is deliberately narrow. Kodak did not need to abandon film in 1975. It plausibly needed, by the late 1980s, to give digital a separate mandate, separate measures of progress, and permission to cannibalize the old business before competitors took the market. The 1989 camera and Kodak's later strategic-renewal efforts make that a more defensible question than the simple claim that Kodak should have bet everything immediately. 1 4

The evidence also limits the conclusion. Earlier commitment might have bought Kodak time, software capability, customer relationships, and more strategic options. It does not prove Kodak would have become Apple, or that digital cameras would have carried film-level margins. John Kotter's account is a retrospective interpretation of organizational complacency, not a board transcript, and the episode labels it that way. 6