Kodak vs Instagram

The Internet Is Not the Answer

by Andrew Keen  · 5 Jan 2015  · 361pp  · 81,068 words

no longer any rest to do. And so, between 2003 and 2012—the age of multibillion-dollar Web 2.0 startups like Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram—Kodak closed thirteen factories and 130 photo labs and cut 47,000 jobs in a failed attempt to turn the company around.43 And then, having

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, as he typed away on his laptop researching and designing the first Instagram filter.” And so Instagram and its photos—what Systrom, shamelessly appropriating Kodak’s phrase, calls “Instagram moments”—were born. With fuzzily named filters like X-Pro II, Hefe, and Toaster, this free mobile network became an instant viral hit

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like Eastman’s late-nineteenth-century startup, Systrom’s early-twenty-first-century photo network has imprinted itself on our everyday lives. The Instagram moment has replaced the Kodak moment. Not a bad return-on-investment from a day spent swinging in a hammock on a Mexican beach. An Untruthful Mirror But

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’s here—in the quantifiable realm of jobs, wages, and profit—that we can find the most disturbing implications of the shift from the Kodak to the Instagram moment. Original Sin “The personal is the political,” was a liberation cry of the sixties countercultural revolution. But, rather than being political, today’s

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then sold to consumers. Just as Instagram is the anti-Kodachrome product, so it’s also the anti-Kodak company building an anti-Kodak economy. At first glance, Instagram appears to offer a much better deal for everyone than Kodak. The gray Rochester factory has been upgraded to a Mexican hippie resort

The Participation Revolution: How to Ride the Waves of Change in a Terrifyingly Turbulent World

by Neil Gibb  · 15 Feb 2018  · 217pp  · 63,287 words

up with me-too products that no one seemed to care about. Revenues shrivelled. In February 2012, just two months before Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States. A company that just 15 years earlier had virtually owned the global photography market

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. As the economic power shifted north, London became the centre of global trade and Venice started to sink slowly into its canals. However, like Kodak, Polaroid, and Instagram, the thinking the gatherings at Lloyd’s and Jonathan’s coffee house were based on was participatory. They were established to help people participate

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ride a bike. It was an immersive environment. Product development was undertaken in the same agile, fluid, collaborative manner as the original teams at Kodak and Instagram. Everyone was in it together, united in fulfilling the same purpose; their ride to work through the rain and their collective road cycling obsession was

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World

by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler  · 3 Feb 2015  · 368pp  · 96,825 words

didn’t want the competition, and they didn’t want to play catch-up. Thus, on April 9, 2012, just three months after Kodak filed for bankruptcy, Instagram and its thirteen employees were bought by Facebook for $1 billion.20 But how is this possible? How did Kodak—a hundred-year-old

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots

by John Markoff  · 24 Aug 2015  · 413pp  · 119,587 words

in their arguments is that they mask the actual jobs equation and ignore the reality of Kodak’s financial turmoil. First, even if Instagram did actually kill Kodak—it didn’t—the jobs equation is much more complex than the cited 13 versus 145,000 disparity. Services like Instagram didn’t spring

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. That point was made clearly by Tim O’Reilly, the book publisher and conference organizer: “Think about it for a minute. Was it really Instagram that replaced Kodak? Wasn’t it actually Apple, Samsung, and the other smartphone makers who have replaced the camera? And aren’t there network providers, data centers

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that it had been responsible for 21 percent of GDP growth in the five previous years in developed countries.35 The other challenge for the Kodak versus Instagram argument is that while Kodak suffered during the shift to digital technologies, its archrival FujiFilm somehow managed to prosper through the transition to digital

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies

by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee  · 20 Jan 2014  · 339pp  · 88,732 words

of the wealth created in the city of Rochester after company’s founding in 1880. But 132 years later, a few months before Instagram was sold to Facebook, Kodak filed for bankruptcy.8 Photography has never been more popular. Today, seventy billion photos are uploaded to Facebook each year, and many times

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)

by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest  · 17 Oct 2014  · 292pp  · 85,151 words

for $1 billion. (Ironically, this happened while Kodak still owned the patents for digital photography.) Iridium’s missteps and the epochal industry change from Kodak to Instagram were not isolated events. Competition for many of America’s Fortune 500 companies is no longer coming from China and India. As Peter Diamandis has

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era

by Ellen Ruppel Shell  · 22 Oct 2018  · 402pp  · 126,835 words

was sold to Facebook for $1 billion—leaving a baker’s dozen of instant multimillionaires in its wake. A few months before the sale of Instagram, Kodak—a 132-year-old company that held 110,000 patents—declared bankruptcy, leaving scores of loyal employees in the lurch. In the age of Kodak

Who Owns the Future?

by Jaron Lanier  · 6 May 2013  · 510pp  · 120,048 words

data. For instance, one might argue that some of the hundred-thousand-plus jobs that seem to have been lost in the transition from Kodak to Instagram will be made up for because people will be able to use photo sharing to sell their handicrafts more efficiently. While this might turn out

The Upside of Inequality

by Edward Conard  · 1 Sep 2016  · 436pp  · 98,538 words

higher-skilled work earn more, but the rest of the workers are pushed into lower-paying jobs. Digital photography, for example, displaced 140,000 Kodak employees, but Instagram had only thirteen employees when Facebook acquired it.2 The hollowing-out argument takes other forms. One version of the technology-hollows-out-the

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon

by Brad Stone  · 14 Oct 2013  · 380pp  · 118,675 words

digital camera that allowed picture-takers to impose on their photos the historical look of classic Kodachrome film. It presaged mobile-phone applications like Instagram, and, naturally, Kodak killed the project before it ever hit the market. Meanwhile, after Pentagram left the Kindle project, the device seemed nearly ready and close to