Kodak film digital photography failure

Classic incumbent's-dilemma example. Kodak had 95% margins on film and would not cannibalize the business with digital, despite having invented much of the underlying digital photography technology. Used as a non-steel parallel to Bethlehem's management failure.

Kodak. They were printing money. They called it film, but it was money. They had like a 95% margin on film, and they would not give up their film. They invented a lot of the best digital photography technology in the world, but the film guys didn't want to give it up because they had grown up knowing that film was their bread and butter, and they kept their bread and butter until it was all stale and rancid. So it's not just the steel industry, it's Kodak. We could go through a bunch of other industries. People — it just amazes me. These people at business schools will write articles. I remember articles written by some of my friends, one of whom became Dean at Harvard Business School. He was writing articles on the steel industry that were just — I said, Kim, that's wrong. He says, no, it's not. He had an economics degree, he studied labor relations, and he was lecturing me on the steel industry. He became Dean, and so he wrote all these papers, and industry would pay him tens of thousands of dollars a lecture, because he was — but that doesn't mean he knew anything.