Grab More Market Share: How to Wrangle Business Away from Lazy Competitors

How Could They Just Stand By and Watch?

What makes this entire scenario particularly startling is the fact that Kodak actually had a prototype for the world's first digital camera in 1975. However, the company waited until 1998 to reluctantly enter the consumer market. This debacle wasn't simply a matter of Kodak ignoring a new trend; indeed, the company was ignoring a revolutionary trend that it had invented!

Meanwhile, comparatively small calculator and wristwatch company Casio took a chance on changing the collective consciousness by launching the first consumer-friendly digital camera in 1995. In May 1996, Canon paid attention and raised the bar with the PowerShot 600. By September of that year, Olympus jumped in with its D-300L (which had a mere 0.08 megapixel).

By 1998, the field was on fire. Digital cameras from Canon, Agfa, Hewlett-Packard, Leica, Olympus, Minolta, Sony Cyber-shot, Fujifilm, Casio, Epson, Ricoh, Toshiba, and Nikon flooded the market; even Kodak introduced a couple of models. However, the Kodak models didn't seem to get the same press interest as the other manufacturers—largely because (in my opinion, at least) Kodak's heart wasn't in it. Maybe Kodak still wasn't convinced that consumer digital photography was anything more than a fad. After all, the bulk of its massive profits still came from selling film.

You probably know the rest of the story. Digital photography changed the world. Instant images can be viewed, manipulated, e-mailed, faxed, PDF'd, converted ...