says a lot about the US in general as well.
As noted in my last post I'm doing a lot of scanning of old photos right now, mostly from the 50s to the 70s for the todays crop. So of course that means a lot of exposure (haha) to Kodak slides and all the promo material surrounding it.
Of course in the business news the last few days are headlines of Kodak's bankruptcy. They want to sell and sue their way out of their financial problems, but that's no long term strategy, that's desperately grasping at straws.
Dealing with old Kodak products you really get a feeling for what that company was. It cared about a good product. ..no that's not even true, they cared about having the absolute best product, always, every time even as a sprawling international company.
Back in the days when you payed for long distance calls, paper mail was the norm, and it took a week to get a letter to Europe they maintained an epic network of the best products. The pictures I'm dealing with were were supplied, taken, and developed from Europe, to Texas, Kansas, and Alaska. Yet they maintain the same quality from place to place.
We can do that nowadays no problem, but I was just thinking that was quite a feat back then. It must have been incredibly difficult to just get a memo out talking about the new graphic to put on the slides. ..just that kind simple problem that they innovated solutions for back then.
What made them really the best though, wasn't consistency. It was quality, they had it, and they invested in it, and they promoted it.
Reading posts from archivist nowadays the old timers praise endlessly their 30, 40, sometimes 50 year Kodachrome slides and prints for not fading. At the same time they show a stream of competitors products losing all the information they were entrusted with. This didn't happen by luck either, there were many formulas used even by Kodak alone, but they invested in the research to know what would last.
Still we didn't know that for sure until today. So you couldn't base your success on that alone. In fact that kind of focus on the long term would be unheard of nowadays. You don't get something built to last unless you pay an especially high premium for archival quality. Pay any less and you're assumed to be losing your data and merchandise in about a 5 year period. Though you will most likely get lucky and outpace that by a fair amount.
So if even long term quality wasn't the secret what was it? Detail I think, craftsman level detail, even on a mass produced, heavily franchised product. No matter where you bought a Kodak product you knew you were getting the best available, and you were happy to pay a little bit more for it. Note I say a little, because even though it was the best it was still priced at a usable point, not out of reach even for the everyday user.
I notice things like a special little note put into the boxes announcing how every slide would now be dated. Even such a small improvement in the process is brought to your attention to appreciate, when it could have been ignored just as easily. At the same time this wasn't just marketing hype, showing you an obvious feature in the hopes you wouldn't notice its flaws, because again it was Kodak and assumed to be among the best.
Currently when you go to purchase Kodak you don't get anything near that. You get a jumble of digital cameras mixed in with the rest. To be fair they have decent if not ground breaking features. Sadly they have lackluster software that is decent, but nothing more then that. You may look around and see rebadged accessories like SD cards, nothing special other then the packaging sealed with the otherwise generic item in China was printed to go with your new camera.
Why would you buy that? ..and of course no one does. The thing is they, and we as the US need to start making our own products, and caring whether or not they suck. ..then amazingly people will start coming back to our brands.
Unfortunately its a bit of work.. like communicating that graphic was in the 50s. We can do it though, its just a matter of whether we want to. Whether we want to continue renting our country from the Chinese, or would rather start affording our lifestyle.
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