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   Stewart Johnson

   (logged in via LinkedIn)

   "It would be interesting to repeat this analysis using Facebook data, but there is no reason to believe the results would be substantially different."

   I think there are reasons to think it would be different -- Facebook ranks number 1 in percentage of people's time spent on the internet, and is not a dedicated photography site like Flickr. I don't have numbers, but I would expect that the proportion of phone camera photos on Facebook would be much higher than Flickr.

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      David Glance

      (Director, Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia)

      Hi Stewart, yes I certainly thought that initially - that Flickr was a more specialised site - but I think the reasons and decision to save photos to Flickr of Facebook - for the purpose of saving them - would remain the same. But it would be good to see the data.

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         Mark Devlin

         (logged in via Facebook)

         Results using Facebook would be VERY different. Flickr is well known as a site for semi-pro photographers. Of all of my Facebook friends only two use Flickr, both of them have pro-level cameras and would consider themselves to be "photographers". Everyone else uses Facebook with 90% of the photos taken with their phones and about 20% of those filtered with Instagram.

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   Mark Harrigan

   Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)

   I worked for Kodak for a number of years in the 80's and early 90's. First in their R&D labs and then in technology marketing (with a focus on digital and electronic technology). They were a great company to work for and in their heyday were a world leader.

   This article and the analysis as to the reasons for Kodak's demise is interesting - but not I think entirely accurate. In fact the future demise was obvious to many of us within the company, especially those of us who were in the technology…

   show full comment

   I worked for Kodak for a number of years in the 80's and early 90's. First in their R&D labs and then in technology marketing (with a focus on digital and electronic technology). They were a great company to work for and in their heyday were a world leader.

   This article and the analysis as to the reasons for Kodak's demise is interesting - but not I think entirely accurate. In fact the future demise was obvious to many of us within the company, especially those of us who were in the technology area and had carriage of some of the early forays into the digital world. One of the reasons I left in 1993 to join a technology innovator (Invetech later to become Vision Systems) was because I could see the company was incapable of abandoning or transitioning from its (lucrative) film legacy. I was a relative "minnow" but far from alone in experiencing this frustration and there was a major exodus by the mid 90's of some of the leading digital technology advocates and pioneers in the company in the USA.

   But it was not because Kodak didn't understand how photos were used or would be used - far from it. In fact the internal mantra at the time as based on "Capture, Store, Manage and Share" - and the focus was on developing and linking technologies to facilitate and promote all four aspects of that process.

   It is a myth that we thought photos were about "memories" (although we that was an important psychological driver at the time tiem about why people took photos). In fact we knew that most printed photos lived "in the shoebox" and that photos were really ephemeral. We knew that 99%+ of all photos printed had been taken in the last few weeks, not reprints of "memories".
   This was well understood by both the "new guard" (digital) and the "old guard" (film).
   That's a bit of an over simplification of course but it will suffice.

   I would tell the story quite differently from David I am afraid (no offence intended and I enjoyed the article - but I was there at the time)
   Kodak was a pioneer (pre-internet) of what we then called Photo-CD - with a specific focus on storing and sharing images - and doing so digitally.

   But the fact is film was VERY cheap to make (as was paper) in large quantities. It was VERY profitable and it was a market that Kodak dominated (remember all those Kodak Express mini labs in all the shopping malls? At one stage Kodak Express was the biggest retail franchise in Australia with over 800 outlets)

   And 35mm film to this day has superior resolution (well over 25 megapixels) to even the best digital cameras - and you can REALLY see this when you blow up the print.

   BUT (and it is a big but) - who cares - except the aficionados. The reality is even a 1.6 megapixel camera will produce a 4x6" print virtually indistinguishable from a film point and shoot.

   There was a huge internal debate between the new guard - who could see that although the "rivers of gold" from film were hugely profitable and film was "technically" better there was a digital future coming (we were early "internet" users even before it went public - almost all the Kodak digital literati had CompuServe accounts). But the "old guard" could not be persuaded.

   Plus, although Kodak had many leading digital technologies (we launched one of the first digital camera backs on the world at the Ford Australia Open in 1991 - a 1.6 megapixel back on a big Nikon with a "Brick sized 50 megabyte "portable" hard drive - and put a picture of the semi-final winner on the New York picture editors desk in less than an hour - pre-internet and a "revolution" at the time) - it was VERY slow to move.
   We also pioneered thermal dye sublimation printing in the early 90's (off the back of a reduced pentagon contract to produce high quality digital satellite images for use in AWACS planes) - capable of producing 11x17" digital prints of brilliant quality indistinguishable from traditional Silver Halide technology
   But Kodak was used to an oligopolistic market that moved cautiously. It didn't understand the IT world and the implications of Moore's Law on product lifecycles - so the company lacked the ability to be as nimble as it needed to be.
   You also had to visit headquarter at Rochester to truly appreciate what a monolith it was. Over 85,000 employees in the one town. The main manufacturing plant(Kodak Park) had 50,000 employees. It was a half hour bus ride (yes they had their own buses) to get from one end of the plant to the other and there were three separate fire stations (and significant in size - 2 stories, bigger than most Melbourne suburban fire stations). Everything else was on a similar scale. It was truly VAST. They had over 2000 employees world wide(but mostly in Rochester) just in Manufacturing Research (how we made stuff not just what we made).
   There were some brilliant and wonderful people. But I'm sure most people can appreciate that such a monolithic enterprise that had experienced almost a century of success and world leadership in a field that hadn't changed much for a long time was "slow" to adapt.
   By the time the internet arrived (commercially and publically) in the mid 1990's most of the digital pioneers in Kodak had left out of frustration.
   The "old guard" continued to focus (for understandable reasons) on preserving film and print for as long as possible - and indeed did pretty well in innovating to maximise the linkages between digital (which has superior capture-convenience, storage, management and sharing capabilities but lower capture-quality and sharing "viewing" quality capabilities than film) - but they never understood the internet or how to use it. But then indeed what established company did or has?
   Many efforts were made - including alliances with Apple, HP and others. But the reality is today that most images are stored on local discs or in the cloud and shared on web pages (only to disappear a short while later).
   They are just as ephemeral as ever they were - and the people at Kodak understood this quite well.
   But they were unable to get their heads around how the internet would impact their business - or that the money in the future (=now) was to be made not from the reproductions of the images of themselves - but how they are used (Facebook anybody?).
   But who can blame them? Who among us can say we could foresee the emergence and dominance of Google, Amazon, Ebay, Facebook and Twitter (to mention just a few)? All we could say was that digital technology and the internet would change things - and it will continue to do so :)

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      John ED Barker

      (Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University)

      A very valuable contribution, Mark. It's often very difficult to get an objective inside story about a large company in decline- most players want to blame, deny or move on quietly.

      Your comment: "The "old guard" continued to focus (for understandable reasons) on preserving film and print for as long as possible - and indeed did pretty well in innovating to maximise the linkages between digital (which has superior capture-convenience, storage, management and sharing capabilities but lower capture…

      show full comment

      A very valuable contribution, Mark. It's often very difficult to get an objective inside story about a large company in decline- most players want to blame, deny or move on quietly.

      Your comment: "The "old guard" continued to focus (for understandable reasons) on preserving film and print for as long as possible - and indeed did pretty well in innovating to maximise the linkages between digital (which has superior capture-convenience, storage, management and sharing capabilities but lower capture-quality and sharing "viewing" quality capabilities than film) - but they never understood the internet or how to use it. But then indeed what established company did or has?"

      This is a classic example of the "sailing ship effect". To quote: "The sailing-ship example is recounted by Gilfillan (1935) who showed how the 'old' sailship was improved as steamships emerged during the 19th century. Improvements concerned nearly all of the components and materials of the sailship which was thus transformed from a basically wooden structure to a basically metallic one, whose carrying capability was massively improved. The basic point is that:
      ''It is paradoxical, but on examination logical, that this noble flowering of the sailing ship, this apotheosis during her decline and just before extermination, was partly vouchsafed by her supplanter, the steamer.'' (http://www.druid.dk/conferences/summer2004/abstracts/ds2004-71.html).

      We can see the same story playing out in the NBN debate, with Malcolm Turnbull at the helm of the copper-wire-and-wireless-powered sailing ship, with Tony as his first mate (or vice versa?).

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   Clayton Esterson

   (logged in via LinkedIn)

   Hi Steve,

   A good, insightful article. I worked with Intel and Kodak when they were partnered to develop a digital camera in the late 90's. Although the outcome was these digital kiosks, much could be written about what went wrong in that relationship.

   In the early days, Kodak was a leader in the digital camera business. They were the #1 digital camera maker and sold excellent digital cameras and lost money on every consumer camera they sold. As you indicated, Kodak badly over-estimated the…

   show full comment

   Hi Steve,

   A good, insightful article. I worked with Intel and Kodak when they were partnered to develop a digital camera in the late 90's. Although the outcome was these digital kiosks, much could be written about what went wrong in that relationship.

   In the early days, Kodak was a leader in the digital camera business. They were the #1 digital camera maker and sold excellent digital cameras and lost money on every consumer camera they sold. As you indicated, Kodak badly over-estimated the number of digital pictures that consumers would chose to print (they guessed around 10%. The actual number is significantly less than 1%).

   One of the nails in the coffin was Kodak losing Walgreen's print business to Fuji. Walgreen's was unhappy with the Kodak print equipment and Kodak's response was "We're really not in this business." It was not unusual to visit a Walgreen see an unplugged Kodak printer next to the Fuji printer that was cranking out prints.

   Kodak saw the writing on the wall about the death of film, but was unable to transition to a business that does not depend on re-occurring material costs.

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      Walter Dufresne

      commercial photographer (logged in via email @wd-p.com)

      "Kodak saw ... the death of film, but was unable to transition ... ."
      Hear, hear and amen. While more than a few Eastman Kodak ad campaigns from the late 20th Century focused on using photography to make memories, Eastman's revenues and profits came from selling expendable supplies: silver-salt films and papers and their processing chemicals.
      The new digital sensors (complimentary metal oxide semiconductors and charged coupled devices) destroyed the market for the thing Kodak made and sold, silver-salt films and papers.
      A sensor that a photographer can expose only once is now an anachronism.

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      David Glance

      (Director, Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia)

      Hi Clayton - I passed a drug store in the city yesterday and I must admit to being surprised that they even still offered the print kiosk service - but you are right - they were all Fuji - the dedicated kodak shop in our town went last year

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   Jane Rawson

   (Editor, The Conversation)

   Hi David
   given everyone's enthusiasm for seamless sharing, do you have any idea why no cameras (as far as I can tell) give you the ability to directly upload your photos to the internet (without going via a computer)?

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      Grendels

      (logged in via Twitter)

      Jane, There are indeed several models of camera that upload directly to the internet - the first of these was in fact produced by Kodak. Nikon, Canon, Sony and Panasonic all have cameras with at least WiFi capability. The main reason that most cameras don't have direct upload capability seems to be the bandwidth required if you were to enable this over 3g networks using a camera capable of producing high resolution images. It can be done, and it is done, but it is not yet a common feature. Given the size of some image files it may be a while before 3g or more likely 4g networks can manage to do this quickly.

      There is a company that sells SD cards with geo tagging and wifi capability built in to the card allowing potentially any camera that uses that type of card to directly upload images.

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         Jane Rawson

         (Editor, The Conversation)

         Thanks Grendels, this is good to know. Unsurprising that my premise was not founded in fact!

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            David Glance

            (Director, Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia)

            Hi Jane - in fact there were new point-and-click cameras from Samsung announced at CES supposedly "unweirding" the wireless connection process and providing cloud storage of photos

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   M Cline

   Good Guy (logged in via email @georgetown.edu)

   While this data is interesting, I think you are making the wrong conclusion. For the past 25 years or so, Kodak had made most of their money from the sale of film and items relating to developing film (sellilng the machines, chemicals and running a wholesale developing business). They had long ago ceded the building of cameras themselves to other companies (such as Nikon, Canon, etc)

   The problem for them is that the part of the value chain that they were in doesn't exist anymore. The closest…

   show full comment

   While this data is interesting, I think you are making the wrong conclusion. For the past 25 years or so, Kodak had made most of their money from the sale of film and items relating to developing film (sellilng the machines, chemicals and running a wholesale developing business). They had long ago ceded the building of cameras themselves to other companies (such as Nikon, Canon, etc)

   The problem for them is that the part of the value chain that they were in doesn't exist anymore. The closest analogue to selling film is selling SD cards, which are 1.) Not as profitable 2.) More or less a commodity, so Kodak would have trouble differianting themselves 3.) Is better suited to be manufactured by an electronics company.

   The "developing" part of the market has shifted in two ways. First, it's not the same market. The process is completely different now and lowered the barriers to entry(think how many options there are to print photos from Picasa to Ofoto to the Pharmacy). In the past, there were less options and they mostly all used Kodak in the background to some extent. Second (and as this article states), people just don't print as many pictures as they used to. To be honest, i think this is more of a factor of printing being the only way to see your pictures in the past. I don't think people are any more or less sentimental. Camera phones have only increased the number of pictures being taken because the incremental cost of a photo is now close to $0 (whereas it used to be more like USD $.50 for physical film and development)

   So, I would opine that Kodak's ultimate demise was the change in the market. The only area with serious money left in it is the camera. Printers was probably a distraction (or they should have bought Lexmark rather than starting a new division). The kiosk's are probably fairly successful, but it's a drop in the bucket revenue-wise. Another opinion (which looks poor now, but might have looked better years ago), would have been to buy someone like Olympus. They have a decent camera divsion, had diversification away into Commercial Applications, etc. Since Olympus (in hindsight) was cooking their books, something similar to that would have been a good idea. Overall, their strategy was to start up a new printer company AND a new camera company. Both of these probably would have been more successful by buying not building and without having a successful camera division, Kodak would have to resign itself to being a much smaller company if it could survive at all.

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   Glen Fuller

   (logged in via Twitter)

   Hi David, are you familiar with histories of Kodak? Specifically, the role of Kodak in being a central actor in producing the concept of photographic biography/memory as a marketing exercise to sell more cameras. See, for example, Kamal A. Munir and Nelson Phillips (2005) “The Birth of the ‘Kodak Moment’: Institutional Entrepreneurship and the Adoption of New Technologies” http://oss.sagepub.com/content/26/11/1665.short

   If this history is accurate, then there seems to have been a failure in the corporate culture at kodak to properly produce new markets.

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      Mark Harrigan

      Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)

      Glen - I've not read the history - but it sounds like bunk to me.

      There was never that much money in cameras per se - for a long time all the Kodak branded cameras will manufactured (OEM) by Chinon and then Kodak branded.

      While money was made from that effort, that was not the point.

      It's pretty much the gillette strategy (who actually derived it from Kodak) - we sold Cameras as a vehicle to sell film - not the other way around

      In consumer land we never cared much about selling more Cameras EXCEPT as a means to sell more film. We knew that, on average, the amount of film put through a camera (or amount of shots taken) was maximised in the first few weeks/months of the camera's life. A real Pareto effect where 80% of the photos taken occur in the first 20% of the camera's life

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         Glen Fuller

         (logged in via Twitter)

         Mark, the histories discussed in the article to which I linked above go back to the early 20th century.

         The article discusses the way Kodak marketing was central to the process of transforming photography from a specialised and professional practice into something that belonged to anyone who could afford the consumer-based technologies. The article is interesting in the way it argues that entrepreneurial activity is, in part, the production of new markets.

         The best example of the photography/memory assemblage is the 'photo album', which according to the article was created and popularised by Kodak's marketing department.

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            Mark Harrigan

            Dr (logged in via email @tpg.com.au)

            Interesting Glenn - I guess it illustrates how things change over time. Whilst the concept of "memories" is interesting in terms of consumer popularisation 100 years ago it had become redundant by the 70's/80's. As I indicated Kodak well understood then the "problem" of the "shoebox" - where most photos finished up never to be view again.

            We understood quite well that the main purpose of photo prints was to "share" with loved ones, friends etc - albeit the method of sharing pre-digital was via…

            show full comment

            Interesting Glenn - I guess it illustrates how things change over time. Whilst the concept of "memories" is interesting in terms of consumer popularisation 100 years ago it had become redundant by the 70's/80's. As I indicated Kodak well understood then the "problem" of the "shoebox" - where most photos finished up never to be view again.

            We understood quite well that the main purpose of photo prints was to "share" with loved ones, friends etc - albeit the method of sharing pre-digital was via hardcopy in person or in the mail. Of course photos as "memories" mattered (and Mum was regarded as the keeper of the memories so we made an effort to make mini-labs when they emerged in the 80's to be an attractive non-smelly chemical retail environment) but they were secondary

            But regardless there was never, to my knowledge, a time when the focus was on selling cameras except as a means to an end. Indeed in the early George Eastman days the focus was on making the camera (box brownie anyone?) as inexpensive as possible - which was part of the entrepreneurial activity to extend photography into as wide a market as possible.

            Kodak remained entrepreneurial (new products into new markets) for a long time. Most people are unaware that for decades we also had a thriving medical imaging and business imaging (microfilm) business - and the business imaging made a rapid transition into digital. Kodak had a 1 terabyte optical disc juke box library in the early 90's (when a BIG hard drive was 40 megabytes) - and a high speed document scanner that scanned 90 pages a minute duplex A4 (B&W group 4 fax compression with full barcode indexing). We provided one of the largest business digital imaging solutions in the southern hemisphere to the ASC (now ASIC) who literally needed to scan and archive for retrieval as many as 90000 documents a day - all before the internet started to make paper documentation sem-redundant.

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      David Glance

      (Director, Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia)

      Interesting article Glen - certainly one's ability to set the agenda when you have a dominant hold in the market is going to be different to when that time has passed.

      Coincidentally there is an article about 7 habits of unsuccessful CEOs - one of which is to rely on what worked in the past http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/3/

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   Steve Hill

   Management consultant (logged in via email @gmail.com)

   The initial assertions of this article feel pretty weak:

   1) The % of photos uploaded from a dedicated camera to flickr is a *worse* indicator of the success or otherwise of dedicated cameras than the % of flickr members using dedicated cameras. The latter gives you some indication of commercial success; the former just tells you about how heavily cameras are used.
   2) Flickr has large numbers of serious users -- amateur and professional -- who upload very large numbers of photos from dedicated kit. It has a wildly different userbase, using the site for wildly different purposes (e.g., showcasing their artistic abilities), to facebook, which is dominated by people taking quick snaps and sharing them with friends.

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      David Glance

      (Director, Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia)

      Hi Steve,

      Actually if you look at world camera market share, the data is equivalent - Canon is 20% of the market, Nikon 13% and Kodak 7% http://www.1001noisycameras.com/2011/04/year-in-review-5-global-2010-digital-camera-market-share-according-to-idc-japan.html

      The point of using Flickr data was that it had been used by a journalist to assert that everyone was using iPhones instead of dedicated cameras and that clearly wash't the case on Flickr.

      As for Facebook - we don't know - whilst yes, people take a lot of photos of themselves, parties etc - they also still use and take a lot of photos with dedicated cameras and still upload them to Facebook - partly because it is more convenient to store photos in Facebook - even from iPhoto for example than anywhere else and there are no limits - whereas on Flickr there are.

      But we would need to look at the data to tell

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   John ED Barker

   (Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University)

   An interesting and thought provoking article, David.

   Although the discussion on Kodak's relative share on Flickr and Facebook provokes the question as to what are most people doing with their photographic images, I'm not sure that it directly relates to the question as to why Kodak is tanking. A large market share is nice, but not necessary for success: a good example is Apple Computer, which, before the iPod, iPhone and IPad, only had a single-figure share of the laptop and desktop computer market…

   show full comment

   An interesting and thought provoking article, David.

   Although the discussion on Kodak's relative share on Flickr and Facebook provokes the question as to what are most people doing with their photographic images, I'm not sure that it directly relates to the question as to why Kodak is tanking. A large market share is nice, but not necessary for success: a good example is Apple Computer, which, before the iPod, iPhone and IPad, only had a single-figure share of the laptop and desktop computer market for several decades- and continued to grow and has always been profitable. Profits are an absolute, not relative concept- the growing photographic market could have been good news for Kodak, even with a declining share of the total market.

   Kodak is a great subject for business school case studies as it is familiar, large, and has a long a publicly accessible history. From what I have read (and experienced as a keen photographer for six decades), I would agree with M Cline's analysis that Kodak got stuck with the wrong business strategies. Kodak essentially focused on the 'razor blade' strategy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebie_marketing), ie making its profits on the consumables, rather than the camera. And even in that market, as Clayton Esterson indicates, they have been edged out by Fuji (who have a lock on the Harvey Norman and K-Mart on-line phot-printing market in Australia).

   Further, being an inventor is not the same as being an innovator and even then, 'fast-followers' can edge out 'first movers' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-mover_advantage).

   As the article by Munir and Phillips referred to by Glen Fuller is behind a paywall, I can recommend the (freely available) article by George Mendes, 'What Went Wrong at Eastman Kodak' (You'll need to Google it).

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      David Glance

      (Director, Centre for Software Practice at University of Western Australia)

      Thanks for your insights John - I will read the Mendes article. One of my particular interests in technology is how it fits in with social and cultural trends. This made Glen's article and the van Dijck article I mentioned particularly interesting approaches to viewing how photography fits in with our lives and how much of that is shaped and/or misinterpreted by companies Whilst you are probably right about the details of the business failures, all of those decisions by Kodak were made by people sticking to their view of the world - so perhaps this is why they would have so badly overestimated the volume of print as Clayton mentioned?

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         John ED Barker

         (Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University)

         I certainly agree with your main point, David- in marketing terms that's 'customer focus'.

         Mendes refers to this in the context of Ted Levitt's legendary 1960 HBR paper 'Marketing Myopia' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_myopia and www.casadogalo.com/marketingmyopia.pdf for a download). In Levitt's terms 'what business is/was Kodak in?'- it claimed to be in the permanent image (memories) business when it was mainly in the chemicals and paper business.

         It's an interesting question…

         show full comment

         I certainly agree with your main point, David- in marketing terms that's 'customer focus'.

         Mendes refers to this in the context of Ted Levitt's legendary 1960 HBR paper 'Marketing Myopia' (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_myopia and www.casadogalo.com/marketingmyopia.pdf for a download). In Levitt's terms 'what business is/was Kodak in?'- it claimed to be in the permanent image (memories) business when it was mainly in the chemicals and paper business.

         It's an interesting question to ask what business Flickr and Facebook are in- Wikipedia describes Facebook as 'a social networking service' and Flickr as an 'image hosting website'. I would say that, like 'newspapers', they are in the advertising business, where they are using text and image storage services to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. It would be interesting to see how they would redefine themselves if customer preferences shifted outside their present comfort zone(s).

         In my innovation lectures I try to re-orient students thinking to customer focus in 2 steps: first, by defining an organisation as an 'open system'- ie 'a collection of related elements with a purpose' and secondly, the 'purpose', or 'mission' is to 'meet a market by a means'- the means being how they can configure their 'elements'- ie resources- to best meet the chosen purpose. This approach gets away from the more conventional thinking of the 'purpose' or 'mission' being 'object- focused'- eg our 'mission/vision is to make the world's best widget'.

         Extending this model, Kodak appears to have drifted from being an 'open system'- ie one whose purpose is defined by interaction with its environment- to an 'autopoietic' (or closed) system', whose main purpose is to perpetuate itself (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopoiesis). This seems to be the fate of most organisations.

         To be fair, Kodak, like many mature organisations, was/is highly capitalised with fixed-purpose analog resources (both things and people), with amortisation/payback periods that were much longer than the time-frames of the digital era. To overcome its autopoietic tendencies, it was faced with huge write-downs and de-hirings. It actually did this, but was left with insufficient time and money to make the changes necessary to stay in business.

         Kodak is more than a case study- it's a cautionary tale for all of us.

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   tinny-medi

   (logged in via Twitter)

   great article Dave, certainly the most clear-headed and insightful discussion of the "Death of Kodak" i have read to date.

   one thing that struck me early in the article was your critique of the Titlow analysis. i was intrigued that his breakdown compared the "extremes" only; a handful of popular DSLRs vs only one make and model of camera-phone. it's just a hunch on my part, but inclusion of point-and-shoots might have told a more interesting story. that said, i think that your brand-based pie…

   show full comment

   great article Dave, certainly the most clear-headed and insightful discussion of the "Death of Kodak" i have read to date.

   one thing that struck me early in the article was your critique of the Titlow analysis. i was intrigued that his breakdown compared the "extremes" only; a handful of popular DSLRs vs only one make and model of camera-phone. it's just a hunch on my part, but inclusion of point-and-shoots might have told a more interesting story. that said, i think that your brand-based pie chart sets the record straight.
   still, i would have to agree with Stewart Johnson's "Facebook vs Flickr" remark. i've been with Flickr for several years now and hardly a day goes by that don't see postings of images that easily exceed photojournalistic standards, many if not most taken by "prosumers" who don't actually make money at photography... this isn't random lekking; Flickr is indeed designed for the sharing of high-resolution photos. i'm not familiar with Facebook's capabilities, but anyone who visits Google+ will see that someone's cutting corners on bandwidth!

   as for that shoebox of prints (or "hardcopies" as the kids call them these days) they are still valued, treated like treasures to be scanned, Photoshopped, and posted online ;-)