Kodat Softwar

Kodak Software Biography

source link google.com.pk

Eastman Kodak

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"Kodak" redirects here. For other uses, see Kodak (disambiguation).

Eastman Kodak Company

Type	Public company
Traded as	NYSE: KODK
Industry	Digital imaging Photography
Founded	1888[1]
Founder(s)	George Eastman
Headquarters	Rochester, NY, US
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Antonio M. Perez (Chairman and CEO) Philip J. Faraci (President and COO)
Products	Digital imaging and photographic materials, equipment and services
Revenue	US$ 4.11 billion (2012)[2]
Operating income	US$ −600 million (2011)[2]
Net income	US$ −764 million (2011)[2]
Total assets	US$ 4.67 billion (2011)[2]
Total equity	US$ −2.35 billion (2011)[2]
Employees	13,094 (2012)[2]
Website	www.kodak.com

Eastman Kodak Company, commonly known as Kodak, is an American technology company focused on imaging solutions and services for businesses.^[3] The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, United States and incorporated in New Jersey.^[4] It was founded by George Eastman in 1888.
Kodak provides packaging, functional printing, graphic communications and professional services for businesses around the world. Its main business segments are Digital Printing & Enterprise and Graphics, Entertainment & Commercial Films.^[3][5]
Kodak is best known for photographic film products. During most of the 20th century Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film, and in 1976, had an 89% market share of photographic film sales in the United States. The company's ubiquity was such that its tagline "Kodak moment" entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that demanded to be recorded for posterity.^[6]
Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography, despite having invented the core technology used in current digital cameras. 2007 was the most recent year in which the company made a profit.^[7] As part of a turnaround strategy, Kodak focused on digital photography and digital printing and attempted to generate revenues through aggressive patent litigation.^[8][9]
In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York .^[10][11][12] In February 2012, Kodak announced that it would cease making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames and focus on the corporate digital imaging market.^[13] In August 2012, Kodak announced the intention to sell its photographic film (excluding motion picture film), commercial scanners and kiosk operations as a measure to emerge from bankruptcy.^[14] In January 2013, the Court approved financing for the company to emerge from bankruptcy by mid-2013.^[15] Kodak sold many of its patents for approximately $525,000,000 to a group of companies (including Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe Systems and HTC) under the name Intellectual Ventures and RPX Corporation.^[16]
On September 3, 2013, Kodak emerged from bankruptcy having shed its large legacy liabilities and exited several businesses.^[17] Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging are now part of Kodak Alaris, a separate company owned by the U.K.-based Kodak Pension Plan.^[18][19]

Contents

• 1 Name
• 2 History
  • 2.1 Rivalry with Fujifilm
  • 2.2 Shift to digital
  • 2.3 New strategy
  • 2.4 Timeline
• 3 Products and services
  • 3.1 Current
  • 3.2 Digital Printing and Enterprise
  • 3.3 GECF
  • 3.4 Former
• 4 Operations
  • 4.1 Subsidiaries
  • 4.2 Kodak Research Laboratories
• 5 Notable people
  • 5.1 Presidents and CEOs
  • 5.2 Scientists
• 6 Archive donation
• 7 Environmental record
• 8 Controversies
  • 8.1 Better Business Bureau
  • 8.2 Patent litigation
  • 8.3 Class action lawsuit
• 9 See also
• 10 References
• 11 Bibliography
• 12 External links

Name

1900 Kodak ad

The letter k was a favorite of Eastman's; he is quoted as saying, "it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter."^[20]
He and his mother devised the name Kodak with an Anagrams set. Eastman said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name: it should be short, easy to pronounce, and not resemble any other name or be associated with anything else.^[21]
It has also been suggested that Kodak originated from the suggestion of David Houston, a fellow photographic inventor who held the patents to several roll film camera concepts that he later sold to Eastman.^[21] Houston, who started receiving patents in 1881, was said to have chosen Nodak as a nickname of his home state, North Dakota (NoDak).^[22][23] This is contested by other historians, however, who cite that Kodak was trademarked before Eastman bought Houston's patents.^[24]

History

The Kodak factory and main office in Rochester, circa 1910

From the company's founding by George Eastman in 1888, Kodak followed the razor and blades strategy of selling inexpensive cameras and making large margins from consumables — film, chemicals and paper. As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales and 85% of camera sales in the U.S., according to a 2005 case study for Harvard Business School. This seemingly unassailable competitive position would foster an unimaginative and complacent corporate culture.^{[citation needed]}

Rivalry with Fujifilm

Japanese competitor Fujifilm entered the U.S. market (via Fuji Photo Film U.S.A.) with lower-priced film and supplies, but Kodak did not believe that American consumers would ever desert its brand.^{[citation needed]} Kodak passed on the opportunity to become the official film of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics; Fuji won these sponsorship rights, which gave them a permanent foothold in the marketplace. Fuji opened a film plant in the U.S., and its aggressive marketing and price cutting began taking market share from Kodak. Fuji went from a 10% share in the early 1990s to 17% in 1997. Meanwhile, Kodak made little headway in Japan, the second-largest market for photo film and paper after the United States. Fuji also made headway into the professional market with specialty transparency films such as Velvia and Provia, which competed successfully with Kodak's signature professional product, Kodachrome, but used the more economical and common E-6 processing machines which were standard in most processing labs, rather than the dedicated machines required by Kodachrome. Fuji's films soon also found a competitive edge in higher-speed negative films, with a tighter grain structure.
In May 1995, Kodak filed a petition with the US Commerce Department under section 301 of the Commerce Act arguing that its poor performance in the Japanese market was a direct result of unfair practices adopted by Fuji. The complaint was lodged by the United States with the World Trade Organization.^[25] On January 30, 1998, the WTO announced a "sweeping rejection of Kodak's complaints" about the film market in Japan. Kodak's financial results for the year ending December 1997 showed that company's revenues dropped from $15.97 billion in 1996 to $14.36 billion in 1997, a fall of more than 10%; their net earnings went from $1.29 billion to just $5 million for the same period. Kodak's market share declined from 80.1% to 74.7% in the United States, a one year drop of five percentage points that had observers suggesting that Kodak was slow to react to changes and underestimated its rivals.^{[26][27][28][28]}
Although from the 1970s both Fuji and Kodak recognized the upcoming threat of digital photography, and although both sought diversification as a mitigation strategy, Fuji was more successful at diversification.^[29]

Shift to digital

The Kodak 'K' logo was first introduced in 1971. The version seen here- with the 'Kodak' name in a more modern typeface- was used from 1987 until the logo's discontinuation in 2006.^[30]

Although Kodak developed a digital camera in 1975, the first of its kind, the product was dropped for fear it would threaten Kodak's photographic film business.^[31][32] In the 1990s, Kodak planned a decade-long journey to move to digital technology. CEO George M. C. Fisher reached out to Microsoft and other new consumer merchandisers. Apple's pioneering QuickTake consumer digital cameras, introduced in 1994, had the Apple label but were produced by Kodak. The DC-20 and DC-25 launched in 1996. Overall, though, there was little implementation of the new digital strategy. Kodak's core business faced no pressure from competing technologies, and as Kodak executives could not fathom a world without traditional film there was little incentive to deviate from that course. Consumers gradually switched to the digital offering from companies such as Sony. In 2001 film sales dropped, which was attributed by Kodak to the financial shocks caused by the September 11 attacks. Executives hoped that Kodak might be able to slow the shift to digital through aggressive marketing.^[33]
Under Fisher's successor as CEO, Daniel Carp, Kodak made its move in the digital camera market, with its EasyShare family of digital cameras. Kodak spent tremendous resources studying customer behavior, finding out that women in particular loved taking digital photos but were frustrated in moving them to their computers. This key unmet consumer need became a major opportunity. Once Kodak got its product development machine started, it released a wide range of products which made it easy to share photos via PCs. One of their key innovations was a printer dock, where consumers could insert their cameras into this compact device, press a button, and watch their photos roll out. By 2005, Kodak ranked No. 1 in the U.S. in digital camera sales that surged 40% to $5.7 billion.^[33]
Despite the high growth, Kodak failed to anticipate how fast these digital cameras became commodities, with low profit margins, as more companies entered the market in the mid-2000s.^[34] In 2001 Kodak held the No. 2 spot in U.S. digital camera sales (behind Sony) but it lost $60 USD on every camera sold, while there was also a dispute between employees from its digital and film divisions.^[35] The film business, where Kodak enjoyed high profit margins, fell 18% in 2005. The combination of these two factors resulted in disappointing profits overall.^[33] Its digital cameras soon became undercut by Asian competitors that could produce their offerings more cheaply. Kodak had a 27 percent market-leading share in 1999, that dwindled to 15 percent by 2003.^[35] In 2007 Kodak was No. 4 in U.S. digital camera sales with a 9.6 percent share, and by 2010 it held 7 percent in seventh place behind Canon, Sony, Nikon, and others, according to research firm IDC.^[36] Also an ever-smaller percentage of digital pictures were being taken on dedicated digital cameras, being gradually displaced in the late 2000s by cameras on cellphones, smartphones, and tablets.
In a critical essay, physicist Frank Duarte has argued that several major analog-era imaging companies (including Canon, Nikon, Leica, and Fuji) successfully transitioned from analog to digital, thus indicating that the switch to digital technology is not the only reason for Kodak's decline.^[37] A significant factor, in addition to managerial ineptitude, he argues, was the transformation (began in the early 1990s) from a widely diversified chemical manufacturer to a company mainly focused on imaging.^[37]

^{Click On Free Download} 

^{Click on Free Download}