Kodak is a sad case. They didn't even miss the digital revolution in photography - they actually shipped the first commercial digicams - instead they saw it and chose not to participate. Amazing.
How true this is. I was IT asst. in a small company. Half of the people were wasting time on their computers. Not just the blue-collared warehouse dept. wasting time surfing and getting the computers infected with viruses from the free porn, but also the so called credit managers and sales associates. Said credit manager kept filling up his desktop with links and trivial games even though he knew how to create and use folders, he just left it messy and virus infected. Said culture to pretend to do work half of the time. Sure multi-nationals are greedy to offshore most of the jobs, but the increasingly bs work culture in the U.S. contributed to the downfall. They keep asking for more computer power and memory then you catch them watching the Olympics using Silverlight instead of hunting for customers, updating their online pictures gallery/offloading from their digicam, or just waiting for calls or even taking a nap on the desk.
Fully agree. I do IT now for more than 20 years, and the ONLY (IT) company I have observed to not fail in this time is Microsoft. Seriously - no damn idea why. All others are history or recovered after a big break. WHen I gre up, the Commodore 64 was dominant. Atari came, kwas a success and - failed. Commodore Amiga came and - failed to bankrupty. IBM - rented their mainframes, decided to sell them the one day the last one was sold and it was a big blow, plus the OS/2 desaster (damn stupid UI). Apple - you see them as strong shining example, but before the crawled back to a fired Steve Jobs they were many years working hard on going bakrupt. They NEARLY managed. Pre iMac. The damn list goes on. Sometimes it is comical - Kodak for example just not realizing they lived on borrowed time, and theey were SO dominant, they could easily have maintained their position, or RIM. Come on guys, could you not see that "we do email" is not going to be worth a lot anymore when every phone gets internet? THe list even outside IT is brutal. Take the S&P 500. Then take one 30 years past - and look what happned to the companies in it. You will find MANY that disappeared.