Digital Photography: Kodak
The Big Picture That Kodak Missed
In this episode of unNatural Selection, we hear from Steven Sasson, the inventor of the first handheld digital camera—created at Kodak in 1975. At the time, Kodak was a powerhouse in photography, with over 100,000 employees and a dominant global brand. But rather than embrace Sasson’s invention, Kodak saw it as a threat to its lucrative film and paper business.
Celebrated today with awards including the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation—personally awarded by President Obama—Sasson shares the remarkable story of how a transformative idea was met with resistance inside one of the world’s most innovative companies, and how Kodak’s failure to act on digital photography ultimately led to its dramatic decline. This is a powerful cautionary tale in corporate survival—about groundbreaking innovation, and the corporate inertia that resisted it.
-
(Auto-generated by Spotify. Errors may exist.)
Today I am delighted to welcome Steven Sasson to unNatural Selection.
Steven began his 35 year career at Eastman Kodak Company in 1973 as an electrical engineer working in an applied research laboratory.
He engaged in a number of early digital imaging projects.
1:27
Among these was the design and construction of the first digital still camera and playback system in 1975.
Stephen continued to work throughout the 1980s in the emerging field of digital photography, receiving over over 10 key digital imaging patents.
1:42
Stephen has received numerous recognitions for his work that includes his 2007 induction into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, 2011 election into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2009 Economist Magazine Consumer Products Innovation Award, and then ultimately the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation that he received in 2010 by President Barack Obama.
2:08
Steven, you and I connected years ago.
And so I'm I'm really excited to finally have a chance to talk.
Thank you for being here.
2:16
Speaker 1
Oh, thanks for inviting me, Nick.
I look forward to our discussion.
2:20
Speaker 2
Same here.
One of the things that I want to emphasize about your bio because it kind of like reads through it, is that you invented the handheld portable digital camera and Kodak.
2:32
Speaker 1
That's right.
I built, I built the first one and and the playback system so that I could take pictures and view them without consuming any materials.
And I demonstrated that to Kodak management in 1975 and largely throughout the year 1976.
2:48
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah.
We're definitely going to dive into that.
I just wanted to like bring that out because it kind of like blends into you all of the accomplishments that you have for people.
You just little background.
Kodak was the Apple of its time.
Kodak really spearheaded and and democratized photography for for the masses.
3:09
So in 1980, in 1888, it was founded by George Eastman and George Eastman Kodak.
In 1900, it released a Brownie camera for a dollar, which effectively democratized photography for for for humanity.
3:24
Eventually it revolutionized color photography through the Kodachrome.
It launched the Instamatic camera with over 50 million units sold and in at its peak, I believe Kodak commanded approximately 85% of camera sales, 90% of film sales in the United States.
3:43
And what's a couple more things about Kodak?
I mean, number one was those percentages aren't coincidence.
One of the things that's we'll talk about a little bit more is that in a way camera sales were a loss leader for Kodak.
3:59
They would sell them super cheaply because they saw the opportunity in selling consumables, films, chemical paper.
4:07
The Kodak Building
That was really, it's business the way that it's, it's, it's business model, its culture, the people, the skills that it brought in and so on.
And at its peak, Kodak was in.
And you and I spoke about this before, Steven.
4:23
I grew up in Rochester, NY, which is where Kodak was headquartered.
And back in the 80s, you couldn't, there was no version of Rochester without somehow referencing Kodak.
And of course we had Xerox there and Bosch alone.
4:38
But Kodak was just, it was more than an, an economic lifeline.
Kodak was a culture.
It was a history.
It was an, an identification and an ideal for Rochester because it had been there for so long.
4:54
It was the city.
It was built around Kodak.
Generations of families went there.
Kodak employed about 60,000 people in Rochester alone.
And so being a child, you know, in my teens in the 80s, Kodak was just kind of synonymous with Rochester.
5:11
And and so I can only imagine you in 19, I believe 73 is when you went to Kodak.
5:16
Speaker 1
Yes, that's right.
5:17
Speaker 2
What was it like?
I mean, again, it's like, to me, it's like what the 70s version of Silicon Valley was, you know, when you walk into the Kodak building.
But please, you know, let us know a little bit more what it felt like to to walk into those doors.
5:29
Speaker 1
Yeah.
And I interviewed there in 1973 when I was getting my master's degree and I, I was, I, I was, the interview process involved me going to all the different areas of the company because they were looking for more electrical engineers in general, because photography, even though it's primarily chemically material science kind of thing, more and more of the cameras and equipment that use the materials.
5:57
And that's how they sold a lot of the materials by selling their devices, but was becoming electronic or electrical.
You know, you can imagine cameras with exposure controls, film advanced flashes, things like that.
So they were in general looking for electrical engineers kind of a thing.
And so they, I went on a tour of the business areas, the, the business technology kind of thing, consumer, consumer research labs, government areas.
6:22
They, they were into everything.
Kodak was into everything.
You're right about Silicon Valley and kind of environment.
They, there wasn't anything that they weren't doing.
They were doing medical stuff, they were doing outer space stuff.
They were doing everything there.
So you, you couldn't find a better place for, of diversity of technology, right?
6:41
So I, I landed in an applied research laboratory at the apparatus division, which was the division that made all this equipment that used the materials that was generated by the other big division called Kodak Park.
And so it was there that I found the most interest because in this lab, there was like a materials Group, A math Group, A physics group, an electronics group, and, you know, relatively small groups of people that interdisciplinary and they all mixed together.
7:07
And so you, it was a, you know, it was a really great place.
And so I was thrilled to be there.
And, and, and there were people there.
And this is one thing that gets lost a little bit in today's world where they were experts in their field.
They had been doing it for 20-30 years.
7:24
They were expert in optics or physics, material physics or.
And so these people were just, they were, they were, they were in the next cubicle over or one phone extension away.
You could talk to someone who has so much experience in this.
And then there was no Internet or anything.
7:39
So it really wasn't available any other way than reading books or talking to people.
And, and the fact that I was, could be around all of these really smart people was really energizing for me.
And and so you're right to comment on the the analogy between Silicon Valley and that it was very much like that.
7:59
Speaker 2
I can only imagine the the level of intellectual activity that must have happened when all of a sudden you get this like Steven Sass and electrical engineer bumping into this mechanical engineer bumping into this optics engineer and all thinking about like, oh, wait, let me tell you, let me share something that might help you with that problem.
8:16
Speaker 1
Right, that's exactly what happened.
Are you would, you would at the lunch table or walking in the hallway, you'd bump into people and you say, Hey, I got, you know, a question for you, right kind of thing.
And people were always willing to stop and answer questions.
They, they weren't in such a rush, You know, they, they were, they were, they were driven more by curiosity than a timetable, you know, and, and, and, and, and I really appreciated that because, you know, in my work, when I started doing my, my work in the, in the camera, of course, nobody had done anything like that before.
8:46
Nobody had asked me to do it.
So I was coming at it and I had, I had have a question and I'd go talk to an optics guy, you know, about how the optics might work with the CCD kind of thing.
They, they've never seen that either, but they knew the basics of optics and how big was your image plane and wherever you want to put it?
9:03
And, you know, what kind of spectrum are you going to deal with?
And I got and so that that to me was, was very helpful having that kind of environment where you could touch on it.
It was, it wasn't the Internet.
It was kind of better because I I could call them by their first name.
9:18
Speaker 2
What was the environment like at Kodak that allowed you to do that?
9:21
The Kodak culture
Was it, was it explicit or implicit that like, hey, we've got smart people here, a lot of opportunity, explore, do things, do something with your spare time, you know, was that the kind of culture that Kodak had back in the 70s?
9:37
Speaker 1
What happened is just this whole fortuitous set of events enabled me to make the contribution that I ended up making.
And that was I, I, I was a junior engineer.
And so, and because I was like the youngest guy there almost, I, I was given sort of the new crazy stuff to do because it wasn't that important, because it was so weird, you know, And one of the, one of the things was they asked me to develop a lens cleaning machine where it was, they were cleaning lenses for, for projector lenses and they had an automatic machine, little brushes would go down and clean the lenses and they were in barrels and stuff like that.
10:13
And so this was a, a digital problem.
So they'd give it to a new kid who's going to do digital stuff.
So I learned about digital SSI, small scale integration, digital NAND gates, norgates, counters, stuff like that.
And I built this whole thing, racks of electronics and, and I learned all about how to do small scale integration digitally.
10:33
And then when I was done with that, the actual conversation that started the digital camera project lasted about 45 seconds.
When my supervisor came in and he knew I was done with working and, and they didn't have anything for me to do, you know, majorly because I didn't have much experience.
10:50
So people didn't come to me with their big problems, you know, so he came and said, well, you've got 222 little side tasks for you.
One is to do an analysis of XL movie camera control system or there's a new type of imaging device called a charge coupled device, you know, like the get, maybe get one of these and play with it and see if there's anything useful we can do with it.
11:13
And I, I think I mentioned before I was interested in a light affected silicon.
In fact, that's what I wrote my paper on.
So I naturally jumped at the CCD, even though I didn't really know what that was.
And so I, I, I, I said, yeah, let me, let me do the CCD one.
And he said, OK, well, buy one.
11:29
They cost like a couple $100, which is a lot of money back then.
And, and so I said, buy one and get one and, and play around with it and see if there's anything useful we can learn from it.
That was the extent of the conversation.
It was 45 seconds leaning against my file cabinet.
I sat at my desk.
I said, well, how am I going to, you know, analyze this first I have to get it running.
11:48
And it was a very complicated device to get running, involved a lot of digital timing to get it running.
And then, and then I said, well, if I'm going to evaluate it, I that means I have to do numbers.
So the little pulses that would come out that represent the pixel of the light intensity of that pixel, I turn it into a number, digitize it.
12:06
Well, that'd be great.
But it's going to be fast because the device doesn't store anything.
It just reads it out.
So I have to store the digital number.
So.
So now I'm storing a digital version of the light pattern that I just captured.
What's that?
That's a picture.
OK, so I said this is really cool.
12:21
I said maybe I could build a camera that would would do this right.
And then if I made it portable, it could be a camera that I walked around.
The portability part of it, the camera part of it, I was going to build with no moving parts.
I thought build a camera with no moving parts.
That was just to annoy the Mechanical Engineers in the lab.
That was that was the only reason, you know, there was always this rival between mechanics and electronics.
12:42
And so, so that was kind of the goal I sort of set myself.
I went to the library.
I couldn't find anything on this stuff.
So you just start dreaming stuff up, and then you say, well, I had no budget for this.
Nobody asked me to do this.
But Kodak was full.
I was in the apparatus division.
12:58
That's where they made everything.
So just like the streets of Brooklyn where I wandered around and drag stuff back.
Well, I wandered around manufacturing floors and dragged back optical parts, you know, to make the camera lenses and stuff.
There was a parts storage in the laboratory for doing experiments.
13:13
I used that.
There was equipment there that I stole from other labs.
I mean, literally, this is how I don't think it came together because I couldn't ask permission because they would if I had to spend any money that was going to be a whole question and answer period I didn't want to go through.
And they didn't really care, you know, they as long as I didn't blow anybody up and kill anybody, you know, it was OK.
13:34
This is a side job that I was doing right.
And then of course, the object was, once I have it, this is great that I've captured this image and I can analyze it, you know, looking at the numbers, but wouldn't it be great to look at it?
So then I had to come up with a playback unit to do the opposite of the camera.
13:49
You know, none of this existed.
There were no personal computers or anything like that.
So I, what I did was I, I, microprocessors were just coming to be interesting to people.
They had just implemented the 4004, the first Intel processor in the first copier.
And the guy who was working on that was sitting next to me, again, sitting next to me.
14:09
And I said, well, I'm going to get interested in microprocessors because they're, they're really powerful things, but nobody knows much about them.
So I broke together a research proposal to do an analysis of microprocessors.
And since we had already applied one to our actual product, they were interested in that.
14:24
They let me several, several $1000 on a microprocessor development system for the Motorola MC 6800.
Well, as nice as that sounded, I really wanted to do was make that microprocessor development system into my playback unit.
So once I got this thing back in, I brought it back to the lab and and and we built special boards to fit into the new bus architecture that would, that would allow me to make this these all these special circuits that could take the output of this stored image that was on tape and and reconstructed into a television signal.
14:57
Then I stole the television set and I could put it in there and I could watch a still image of what I took on ATV screen.
OK, so I, you know, don't, don't let anybody tell you that creative writing isn't useful for research because I basically lied to get that that system there.
15:12
And but, but it worked because that was a perfect, perfect vehicle for that.
So now I had a playback system that I had built from scratch and a camera system that we had built from scratch.
And I must today tell you it was in early December that we first put together all of this stuff because you couldn't see anything for over a year.
15:29
I worked on it.
You couldn't see anything.
It just, you could just see oscilloscope traces and, and, and, and that was it.
And voltage measurements, you know, nothing.
In order to see anything, everything had to be built and, and work.
And so we took our first picture and I couldn't believe it.
15:45
It, it worked well, I had a little hiccup on the first one.
Go into that if you want, but, but, but I, I remember getting that first picture and then I went to my, my supervisor's office and I sat down and I said, Gary, Gary Gareth Lloyd was his name.
And I said, you know, my camera's working.
16:03
I just took the first picture.
And he said, oh, terrific.
You know, we had SAT every once every two weeks to talk about what I was doing, only a portion of which was the camera stuff, which was a curiosity, not anything that anybody was interested in.
And he said, oh, that's, that's cool.
We'll, we'll bring some people into the lab and we can look at it.
16:20
He says no, it's portable.
I could.
It's a portable camera.
Oh, I didn't know it was a portable camera.
I mean, I remember that discussion.
He did not know I was building a portable camera.
That's how distant it was, you know.
Not that he was disinterested, it just didn't.
16:33
Speaker 2
It wasn't on his radar.
16:34
Speaker 1
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was, yeah.
You're, you're doing something that's a technology that we're interested in.
What you're doing is I don't really care.
You haven't killed anybody, have you?
You know, that kind of thing.
And, and so then when I had this demonstration, now all of a sudden things got really complicated and I hadn't anticipated right, because now I was demonstrating a system that would take pictures that didn't require any film, didn't require any development footstep, and didn't require any printing on a paper in order to view it.
17:03
In fact, my my thing was I can only consume a few joules of energy and I can do the whole photographic experience and no materials.
I thought that was a great idea.
Others did not.
17:13
Speaker 2
Oh, yeah.
I mean, as I, as I gave the Kodak background, you in that moment, which obviously it's not a moment because it probably took you months, if not a year to build.
But in that process you flipped the entire equation on its head, right?
Because Kodak was a consumables company with a loss leader and a camera.
17:32
And you're like, forget the consumables.
There's this really cool camera thing that doesn't use any of that.
And so the moment that you showed it to your boss and then eventually it grew up like when you first demonstrated this digital camera beyond, you know, to your lab, it could be to your lab colleagues, but then eventually executives as well.
17:54
The most surprising reaction from Kodak
What was what was the most surprising reaction that you got from people at Kodak?
17:59
Speaker 1
Oh, I must tell you, I was unprepared for it in many ways.
Let me tell you what the demonstrations were once I showed it to the lab people, they they wanted because we had relationships throughout the company.
We service the whole company.
18:15
They would invite the management or the leaders of the different business units to come and see this because this could have potentially impact everybody.
And so my demonstration was pretty much the same, was held in the small conference room that was in the research laboratory.
It was a windowless conference room, long table down the middle fits about 12 to 15 people in there.
18:35
And I would they would be in there.
They would invite the meeting.
Actually they would invite the people to the meeting, none of which I knew.
And Gareth, to his credit, allowed me to do all these presentations and do this, do this meeting to people that were several levels above me and him, right.
18:52
So to his credit, he, he enabled me to do this.
Now I learned a lot by doing this because what I would do is I would fold my camera was unfolded.
If you ever see pictures of it, which is kind of unfolded, that's why I worked on it.
Then I folded up at the last minute and then walk in.
It's about the size of a toaster.
19:07
It's a really weird looking thing and I would come in the door not knowing anybody and whatever was sitting in the front on the right side, I would take a head and shoulder shot of them.
I would push the button and then the tape would start to move and I was recording it.
It took about 23 seconds or so to record the actual image.
19:24
It was captured in 120th of a second exposure time and and record time, but to record it to the tape was was 23 seconds.
While that 23 seconds was happening, I said I told him who I was and what this thing was to describe what I had just done.
19:40
And then that was to cleverly hide the 23 seconds it was going to take before I could take another picture.
And then when the tape stopped, I knew I was ready.
So I took the same head and shoulder shot of the person on the left side, whoever was there.
Then I would place the camera down.
19:56
When the camera set with the tape stopped recording, I would pop the tape out.
I used a little tape deck that was part of the camera, and I would hand it to Jim Schickler.
Jim Schickler was the technician who worked with me shoulder to shoulder in the lab, bringing this thing to life.
And he doesn't get nearly the credit he should for for the work he did.
20:12
And he had this playback unit, none of the microprocessor development system I spoke about on a on a cart in the back with a television set on right on top.
And he would plug it in, put the tape in, and then the first picture would come up about 30 seconds later.
OK, So there's a head and shoulder shot of a guy who was sitting in the right side.
20:30
And that's when I lost control of the meeting, OK, Because I had prepared, you know, I had been prepared and expected to talk about how I did what I did as a technologist.
I had done a lot of tricks, mixing technologies, pulling stuff out, using new stuff for the A to D converters and all this kind of stuff.
20:49
So I expected a conversation on the how.
But nobody asked me how.
They asked me why.
Nobody wanted to talk about how.
They wanted to ask why.
Why did you do this?
What problem were you trying to solve?
What exactly is wrong with conventional photography?
Right kind of thing.
And so that discussion took place dozens of times throughout the spring and summer of 76.
21:12
We invited all kinds of people, same demonstration, same.
There was curiosity and caution, basically the way I like to put it.
There was, you know, the tech.
Some of the technical people were very curious about this thing, how it worked and how well it worked.
There were some people who were looking for applications.
21:29
I remember a guy from Business Imaging standing up in the middle of my talk and said, wait a second.
And he took out from his wallet a check, a bank check, slapped it on the table and said take a picture of that.
And I did.
21:44
I took a picture of the check right there in front of him.
And then the picture came up.
And then he walked over to the TV screen.
He looked at it.
He said not enough resolution looking at me.
And then he looked at all the other people around the table that were from his business unit and the the researchers, people supporting him.
21:59
And he said this thing is incredible.
It's just this thing works better than a whole room full of equipment I've seen over there.
It's just amazing, you know, kind of a thing.
So he was looking for the application of Mike, you know, recording checks digitally, right, even in 1976.
22:15
So people were thinking about how to apply this stuff.
Then there was pushback.
The consumer, the consumer guys did not like the look of this thing.
One, it was ugly and, and it wasn't very useful the way it looked.
Second thing is it, it, it was very disruptive to their business plan.
22:33
You, you remember Eastman Kodak had developed a business plan that was extraordinarily effective.
They had been very successful for almost 100 years.
So every photographic experience involved 3 customer touch points, right?
First one, when you went to buy the film, probably from your local drugstore or photo finisher, then you went took the pic, develop the exposed pictures back a second time.
22:57
And then you a third time when you picked up your prints, right?
That's what was happening.
So free exposure test points where you could buy secondary items each time, right?
In addition to the, the fundamental process of, of paying for all of the developing and printing.
And so I remember being pointedly asked by the consumer guy saying, well, what's going to happen to the photo finishing network around the world?
23:17
I said, what, you know, what, what, what are they going to do?
And I, you know, stupid me, I said, well, they could sell batteries and that didn't go over well, as you can imagine, right?
But that was my idea was it was just energy guys, you know, it's not materials anymore.
So I was unprepared and I hadn't really thought about displacing 100 year old business.
23:36
I had thought about, I thought about a new way of doing something that that seemed really cool and modern.
You know, I was brought up, I liked, I was brought up watching Star Trek, you know, and there was no film or paper on the bridge of these Starship Enterprise.
It was, it was all electronic, you know, it was all data moving around and, and that was my idea of the future.
23:57
And, and so this to me made sense at terms of a future application, but in terms of the present reality of the photographic experience, it was not a welcome innovation.
24:08
Speaker 2
In hindsight, Kodak is one of those beacon stories about the innovator's dilemma.
And, and there are all kinds of papers and books written about it and stuff like that.
And, you know, my perspective, having been in kind of this world for a long time of just kind of like creating things and, and, and, and in some situations, literally creating something that would disrupt the core business of where I was.
24:32
It's not as simple as people make it seem.
In retrospect, it's like, Oh yeah, I should have done this, should have done that.
And maybe people should have been a little bit more open minded and, and saw the vision of what this could have become.
But you know, when you're sitting there and, and you're, you know, your whole culture, your thinking, your business, your strategies, your, your, the, the skill sets of the people that you have, your entire factories and, and, and workflows are all built around a certain kind of methodology and, and business model, which is consumables.
25:08
And then somebody comes up with this very disruptive potential.
You, you have to think about the context, right #1 back in the 70s, there was no Internet.
So, you know, all of a sudden there's like this digital stuff.
It's like, you know, how are you going to transport this stuff?
There were no personal computers, there were no laptops, there was no smartphones.
25:26
And so if you're sitting there and you're like, this is the future, but then you're like, well, how who's going to buy it?
Like, you know why nobody's asking for this, You know it.
All it's going to do is disrupt our business if it does take off, But there's really no market for it because what are you going to do with this digital stuff?
25:44
So, you know, I could see people saying in that moment, it's like, well, OK, there is potential here, but that potential doesn't equate to, yes, let's embrace this thing that's going to disrupt our entire industry.
And so again, looking back, it's like, oh, well, maybe they should have had a little bit more foresight.
26:00
But I think in that moment, it's hard to blame people for what they were thinking because their entire reality was based around the the 100 year old business at at that point that wasn't just doing OK, it was essentially the Apple of its day.
26:16
And and then maybe companies today can look at that as kind of like an example of being like, OK, if in that situation, maybe approach it differently.
But there were probably no such models back then for the executives at Kodak, right?
And so I'm not necessarily saying that people didn't make mistakes because I think from what it sounds like, people have definitely got much more defensive about what you invented versus being curious.
26:39
There were some, they were curious like this guy with a check, but it sounds like they they, they, they immediately saw it as a threat and took kind of dug in their heels from that perspective.
26:51
Speaker 1
Yeah, yes, yes.
There, there was a mixture of reactions, as you properly point out, there were, there was curiosity.
People were excited about the technology, especially some of the technical researchy people.
They would come up to me afterwards and say really cool what you did kind of thing, right.
But the business people, you know, what I had to do for this is they always asked about the future, where is this going to happen, right.
27:13
Of course I didn't know.
And I, I eventually settled on using Moore's Law to predict, I asked our research labs when could I get to image quality equivalent to 110 film, which was a very, not a very good film format, to be honest with you.
But it was useful for consumers back in the mid 70s.
27:29
And it was like 1,000,000 pixels, 2,000,000 if you want color, right.
So I use Moore's Law because this was a completely digital implementation.
So I thought it was fair, not leaking that CCDS would follow Moore's Law.
I didn't know, but you know, you just make it up.
And I came up between 15 and 20 years before this, this what might be realistically applied.
27:48
And it turned out I was for all the wrong reasons.
I had, I was, I, I, I was just, you know, I was just flailing because people kept asking me questions I hadn't thought about, right.
And what I had to do because I had no data to support this.
I had to construct through analogy, right?
28:06
Calculators were just becoming available, right?
And so there were no digital products for consumers anywhere, right?
So it wasn't just what I did, but how I did it.
There was a problem because this digital implementation, and you're going to propose that as a consumer product, digital had a sort of a bad reputation because it was complex, expensive, complicated, you know, kind of thing.
28:27
So I said, well, calculators are becoming available and consumers are buying them largely engineers, if you can consider them consumers.
And, and I, I said, so this calculator, think of this as a calculator with a lens, right?
Eventually going that way.
And then I had studied through the, the, the trades I had seen that Wozniak and and jobs were coming up with their computer board in 76.
28:49
I had looked at Wozniak could use the same drams.
I had used the technical, purely technical connection and but by virtue of that technical connection, I saw what they did and I said, well, it's sort of similar to what my playback unit is, although it wouldn't really work that way.
But I said as an analogy, maybe something like that would be useful.
29:07
And so I thought that was sort of a touch point for people to say there's stuff going on in the rest of the world that might indicate this could be a real, real thing in this kind of time frame.
And then the pushback was immediate.
The consumer, the consumer products guy, I never forget, he stood up and said, how much for the calculator?
29:23
And it was 400 bucks.
How much for the board from the California guy?
So wow, 700 bucks.
So for 1100 bucks, you can take way worse pictures than a fully loaded Instamatic for $35.
Why are we talking about this?
You see, I mean, that's, that was the defensive reaction in spite of the, the, the, my, my very crude and probably inadequate way to project the potential future, you know, kind of thing, because I was all making it up on as I kind of went along here, you know, because I wasn't prepared for this, these kinds of discussions.
29:55
Speaker 2
Yeah, it's, you know what, what this brings to mind for me is my experience, which was different when I was at Perkin Omer.
And I don't know how it was for you, but when I started the innovation Lab, we started, you know, we're really pushing digital at the time.
And Perkin Omer was just a conglomerate of devices eventually, you know, essentially they, they had a lot of machines and visualization machines and so on.
30:16
And, and I'm telling them like digital's a future, right?
Your machines are kind of like a loss leader.
What we need to do is think about the data output and what we do with that stuff.
And, and obviously some people were threatened by that, but what helped me was that I had air cover from the CEO down.
And so if I had a middle manager, senior manager to come in and start kind of pushing too hard on the negative side, there would be the CEO saying like, no, no, no, give this guy some time.
30:40
There's there's something here.
It doesn't sound like you necessarily have that kind of air cover sufficiently high enough to be able to protect you from.
30:48
Speaker 1
That I did and I didn't.
I did in a sense that the reason it would, I was so low level.
So, so under the radar kind of thing that I would say from that day in 76 when the camera, well, when I started working on the camera, OK, in 75, I worked exclusively in digital imaging.
31:08
My entire 35 year career at Kodak, no one ever tried to stop me from doing this kind of thing, OK?
I was curious.
I was not allowed to talk about it.
You know that story I just told you, I wasn't allowed to publicly say anything like that until the year 2125 years because of because of the fact that it would, it would impact people's perception of Kodak and what they might do with film kind of thing.
31:31
Nothing to do with me.
I have to do with how it might impact film.
OK, so that was that was part of it.
So, so that allowed me to work on this.
And by the way, I certainly wasn't the only person working on this at Kodak.
There were brilliant people starting to work on this stuff.
31:47
Bryce Buyer developed the buyer array, which is used in all cameras.
That was around the same time.
You know, I met with Bryce Buyer once, I met him and really nice fellow and he knew how to deal with colour.
I didn't know how to deal with colour, you know, kind of thing.
So I mean, this was really good stuff going on, but it was very sort of under the table kind of thing.
32:04
As long as we didn't publicly talk about it, it was fine.
But in terms of, of corporate environment, we, we showed it to literally dozens of meetings of people of 1012 people each, you know, from different parts.
The head of the apparatus division was the highest person we showed it to.
32:20
He came at night one time into the lab he came.
32:23
Speaker 2
Separately until then exactly.
32:26
Speaker 1
And I took his picture and he looked at it, got really close to it and stuff and, and said, yeah, OK, you know, get it.
You know, he got it, you know.
And then Gareth told his wife, told me this story Afterwards, Gareth walked out with him after he's done with the lab.
32:43
And Gareth asked, should we keep working on this?
And Doug Harvey said, yeah, keep working on it, I hope you fail.
And he left.
Wow.
And and so he got it and he didn't like it, right, but he knew that we should keep working on it.
And I was told that the CEO of the company, whom I had never met, OK, and probably never would have met and didn't meet, was asked about this.
33:08
They found out about it through some way, you know, 'cause, you know, taking pictures throughout the film is kind of a disruptive thing.
And so they asked, should we go and see it?
And the answer by the managers that were the next layout low down was no, it's not ready for prime time.
You don't have to go see it.
We're, we're, we're on top of it.
33:24
And I think I, I, I was disappointed by that because it can be cool to meet the CEO, you know, but, but I, I can understand it because the CEO was not going to ask me any questions.
He was going to ask these guys questions.
They didn't have any, they didn't have any answers either.
33:42
You know, I mean, I wouldn't have done any better, but, you know, they would have to explain, well, when is this going to happen?
And they would have to, they could, they could take what I did, but what I they don't trust me, you know, so, so, so I think it was sort of a defensive mechanism.
I think that that this whole presentation that we did in 76 was kind of a disruptive surprise.
34:04
It was a complete photographic system that worked.
Yeah.
You know, it was it was crude black and white, 10,000 pixels, you know, but it was quite recognizable.
I mean, it it demonstrated the entire concept, you know?
Well, there was no excuses to it, right?
You didn't have to explain anything to anybody.
34:20
People would argue with me in the meeting about how it didn't work when their picture was staring at them from the screen.
Wow.
Yeah.
That's.
I mean, that's how much kind of a disruptive thing it was, right?
34:30
Speaker 2
Yeah, totally.
I mean, you were, you were painting a vision, right?
It's not.
It's less about the quality of what's there because here you have a junior engineer that just built this in a spare time.
You know, what you need to do is like look at what this the promise behind this.
But back to you're in this situation where you're trying to pitch digital to a company whose identity is in chemical and film, and you're effectively presenting to them an extinction level threat as you know with it, with an ecosystem that's shifting towards digital and giving them evidence.
35:03
You know, look at these crazy guys Jobs and Wozniak doing digital stuff.
And and it sounds like for for all the reasons that we talked about, I'm sure many more, the higher level management's just kind of didn't they ignored some of these warning signals.
35:20
Speaker 1
Yeah, I think they were aware of it.
They were aware of it.
I mean, these guys were smart guys.
They got it right.
And you know, later in my career, I had something interchange now with with the CEOs and they got it.
It was just hard to change an organization.
Of course, I mean, it's hard to change an enterprise.
35:36
I mean, everybody thinks the CE OS in charge of everything.
And I I don't think they feel like they are, they, they are, they are trying to get their organization to move in a certain direction.
And it's very difficult.
You got to understand Kodak is a very successful company.
They had a business model.
It was second to none.
35:52
I mean, I hope I'm not surprising anybody by saying that photographic film was one of the most profitable consumer products ever devised by man.
I mean, the barrier to entry was enormous.
The profitability once the sunk cost in terms of production was in place, you made a ton of money on this.
36:08
Speaker 2
But I mean, and also the, the lesson for today, if you think about companies like Google, right, you know, it's like modern day Kodak with search and, and, and advertisements and so on.
They effectively were one of the big pioneers that helped develop the web and the, the, you know, to what it is today.
36:29
And now they're facing this kind of extinction level event with AI, which is changing the paradigm of how we search, how we access information and how we digest it.
And it's, well, The funny thing is, is like the parallels are uncanny because Google helped invent AI.
36:46
I mean, AI has been around for a lot longer.
It's been worked on, you know, and they have Turing and even before that.
So as a concept that's been around, but Google has been developing this for 20 years.
They wrote the Seminole paper that they released I think in 2017, which is like I think it was called.
37:02
Speaker 1
Attention is all you need.
37:03
Speaker 2
Attention.
Attention is all you need, yeah.
37:05
Speaker 1
The transformer architecture.
37:06
Speaker 2
Yeah, exactly.
So they created the cost of the transformer and that unleashed AI, and on top of that, they built the cloud, or they were one of the companies that developed a cloud that enabled all of this.
You know, they're also huge into quantum computers and all that stuff.
So they're one of the companies that kind of enabled this AI revolution, but they were also kind of withheld to this innovator's dilemma.
37:29
Not so much that they weren't embracing it because they hired a lot of engineers to build this stuff and they had, you know, they've been using AI and like they're self driving cars and they'd be using AI and all kinds of their technologies behind the hood.
But they weren't unleashing it because they're Google and what Google stands for is like a reputation of quality and AI they felt wasn't ready for this.
37:48
It had a hallucinate, you know, it was hallucinating at all these different things.
They didn't want to put it out there.
People use it in the wrong way or for all kinds of different reasons.
So for for them, their innovators dilemma was like, we can't just throw junk out there and break and then fix it like startups can because we're no longer a startup.
38:05
But then you get these open AI companies and others like, well, we can, you know, we can throw stuff out there, break and they just learn from it.
We have nothing to lose.
And so now Google's in this like catch up, which is like, oh, oh, this is an extinction level event.
How do we respond so that we don't miss it, but at the same time not cannibalize this monstrous business of search and advertisement?
38:25
And so they're in the situation trying to figure out what they do.
I feel like they're almost in this Kodak moment, you know, 2530 years later.
38:32
Speaker 1
I I agree when I when I saw open AI what they did just a few years ago when they launched was it 3 O or 2.5 or whatever it was.
I remember sitting in my chair reading about this and once I understood what they were offering, I said and I, I know exactly what's going on in Google's high offices right now.
38:52
I know exactly what the CTO is being asked.
Why are these guys doing it?
And you weren't.
And the CTO is basically can't say it to his boss, but shouldn't because you didn't want me to.
And, and, and, and that's they were going through exactly the same thing.
39:08
I mean, I felt their pain.
I really did, I really could because they had the smarts.
They, they probably were maybe not as advanced as open AI was because they were very focused on what they were trying to do.
But they, they, they had, they had the bench, you know, and they could, they could have moved, right?
39:25
But they were being held back for all kinds of economic, maybe political, you know, all these kinds of reasons.
But the business model was being disrupted and they didn't have an answer to it, right.
And so that slowed them down.
And then all of a sudden this upstart comes up.
39:40
And they weren't exactly an upstart.
They had been working on it for a while too.
But, but I believe me, I, I remember sitting in the chair saying, boy, I, I know I would be a family on that wall because I would really, I know exactly what's going on there.
39:53
Speaker 2
You lived through it.
I mean, you know, I mean, if almost you could put yourself in those shoes if you were at Google today, what, what kind of if anything there there might be, you know, the situations might be different.
But looking back at your experience at Kodak and then mapping it to what Google is going, like what what learnings might you bring to the table and be like, hey guys, maybe we should think of it this other way or try this other thing.
40:16
Speaker 1
We have to convince people to, to, to disrupt the, IT was always, whenever we're trying to introduce something to digital and not just digital photography, it was digital photo finishing and all these other aspects of digital, applying digital technology to the imaging chain associated with photography, consumer photography and, and commercial photography too, but mainly consumer right now the, you know, the, the challenge, the challenge always was show me the money.
40:42
You know, it was always show me the money.
It was always, OK, if I do this, you will displace this much revenue and this much profit and sub sub optimize our infrastructure.
Tell me how I'm going to benefit by doing that.
40:58
They're a public company.
They pay dividends every quarter.
You know, I mean, I remember Dan Karp once told me he was the CEO of Kodak in the in the late 1990s, short of 2000.
He said, you know, we spend most of our time on the 19th floor, not thinking about five years from now.
41:14
We're thinking about how to get a few more pennies on the dividend next quarter.
You know, I mean, so that's kind of how they were thinking to his chagrin.
I think, you know, he's a smart guy.
You know, we should be doing it.
But it's a publicly traded company.
This is what they're interested in.
41:29
Speaker 2
You know, of course, I mean and Perk and Elmer, you know, I would have conversations with Robert Free, who was the CEO of the time and and he was far more a finance guy than anything.
And so he was he supported me.
He's the one that enabled me to do all this there on the digital side, but his day-to-day was thinking about returns to investors and shareholders and you know, quarterly returns and you know, filings and so on and innovation.
41:54
For as much as you know you want to talk about it and do it, it doesn't add to the bottom line immediately.
It's a long term play that actually it consumes resources, it consumes time in a way that stockholders typically don't want to see.
And so it really takes somebody with a fortitude to say, like, we have to do this, we have to take our medicine, but it's people aren't going to like it.
42:16
And and I'm going to put my job on the line, you know, my job being the CEO or the CTO or something like that, knowing what the future is.
And sometimes the best that you can do, especially in your position, is just paint a picture where society's going and saying, like, you know, we need to stay ahead of the times.
And it's not just about our business revenue today, it's about where is our market going to be in two years, five years, 10 years and making sure that we're positioned to be competitive then as much as we are right now.
42:44
And it sounds like a lot of the management there wasn't necessarily facing or embracing or recognizing and, and we're seeing it again, you know, I mean public companies today, the in the S&P 500, their lifespan is far shorter than it was 100 years ago.
43:02
You know, these these companies are seeing extinction level events all over the place.
We're witnessing today, not only with Google, but with other companies.
And then who knows, Google might learn from the past and they might do something really interesting to be able to lead and, and they have the resources for it.
43:18
I think it's just going to take a strong will to cannibalize what they have.
And I think they do, you know, and their founders, I think Sergey Brin is very involved and he's like, you know what, we're going to leave this no matter what.
So I think they've, they've learned from some of the examples in the past, but it's not going to be easy.
It's not going to be pretty.
43:33
And it's still uncertain how all this is going to evolve.
43:37
Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I, I agree.
It was the closer you get to the reality of the change, the harder the change seems to be.
I'm sorry.
We, we, you know, in 75, we did this.
It was a prototype, very crude.
And I worked on it continuously along with many other people.
43:53
And in 1989, I worked with a master camera designer named Robert Hills, Bob Hills.
And we built ADSLR with a very small team that basically was an implementation of a, of a of a chin on camera.
And we put a Kodak imager sensor that Kodak had developed in it.
44:11
And we had done image compression using discrete cosine transform, which was the basis for JPEG.
So we had all the right elements in there memory cards.
And we built some prototypes and they look like real DSLRs you might even see today, except without an LCD screen in the back.
And we took it to to professional imaging, you know, the people who images professional photographers.
44:32
And we showed it to them.
It worked pretty good.
You know, you can take pictures of color pictures, 1.2 megapixels, I think they were.
And we asked them could you sell it?
And the answer was, yeah, we can.
But why would we?
44:48
Why would we?
I mean, why?
I mean, you're not, there's no revenue stream.
You sell the camera along with the new technology, the learning curve, the reliability issues and all that.
Why would I do that as opposed to keep selling on film?
I mean, this, that's what these guys are trying to do from quarter to quarter year to year was to sustain and grow profits, right?
45:07
And I was introduced and this camera, this camera really worked.
I mean, it, it wasn't like a crazy thing like a 75.
This was you could told it looked like a real camera, right?
And so we generated a patent, as it called, the One O 7 patent, which turned out to be one of the really lucrative patents that they licensed for billions of dollars 1012 years later.
45:28
But that was the utility of that development.
It wasn't the camera itself, because the camera itself was unacceptable to the people who needed to sell it.
45:37
Speaker 2
You know, like you said, you, you came up with this idea, it was threatening, but the executive leadership enabled you to essentially build a department around it.
So you didn't stop.
You kept working on this throughout all this time.
Let's project forward now to, you know, Kodak missed that digital play and, and Kodak is a shell of the company.
45:54
You know, went from 100,000 employees.
So I think like 3000 employees.
The effects on Rochester were tremendous, you know, went from this thriving metropolis to a shell of that.
And, and I witnessed some of that and, and eventually moved out the real estate business in Rochester collapsed.
46:12
I mean, there were so many different ripple effects that happened, but all throughout this, you were still pushing the digital camera at Kodak.
46:18
The Moment When Kodak Missed the Digital Camera
Was there like, and you witness all these changes and in all of these, like, thought processes of the executive leadership team, But you know, from your experience, was there a single critical point where you realize, like, wow, Kodak missed it, You know, because you're still pushing on it, You know, all the way through the 80s and the 90s, was there a moment where you're like, wow, we just missed this?
46:42
Like, OK, like you, you felt that like drop in your stomach, which you're like, there it went.
Like, I've been doing this, I've been pushing.
And now this moment, I'm like, this is reality.
46:55
Speaker 1
I would say in the late the early 90s, we had an extraordinary team.
I, I, I stopped working on cameras because I quite frankly got, after they rejected the Ecam, the camera I just described, I got really discouraged.
Actually, Bob Hills went back to designing what he called real cameras and I went and started developing thermal printers and kiosks type stuff.
47:17
And, and the reason I did that was says, well, at least they're interested in selling some materials associated with this digital printer.
And that turned out to be actually a very successful business for Kodak.
But I saw the cameras were taken over by a very good group of people and Mcgarvey and those guys started making cameras and they did for professionals.
47:39
And then we made Apple's first camera, the Quick Take 100.
A lot of people don't realize that Kodak designed and built that camera, even though our name didn't appear on it and was the first color sub $1000 camera because they, Apple was the imaging computer in the early 90s.
47:55
And so they wanted a, a vehicle to get pictures in there, you know, and so they came to Kodak, you know, so, so we had, we knew how to do it, we just didn't want to tell anybody about it.
So, so I saw that we were trying to do things and move ahead, but we were trying to move ahead with a mindset that we still had.
48:11
We still wanted to sell materials.
So we still wanted them to print.
We still, you know, everything was on.
Well, we're still selling materials, right?
And I remember sitting at the lunch table with guys when we would get depressed about all this because they launched the APS film format in 97, I think it was.
48:28
And I just couldn't believe we were launching a new film form in 1997.
I mean, I just like, I don't get this at all.
But it was to maintain and put profitability of an existing business, which they knew a lot about, right.
And so I, I, we used to place bets as to when Kodak was, was going to go under, which was unthinkable even at that point.
48:48
And I, I bet in the, I bet around 2001 and I was off by several years, of course, because, you know, it had tremendous staying power.
But, but, but, but that's, we were, we were sort of being a little depressed about it in the late 90s or so because we saw we were doing great technical work, but we weren't making much money at it.
49:06
And those cameras were not making a lot of money.
49:09
Speaker 2
And it probably just felt like this, this train that was going off the rails.
It's like, you know, you see it, you see it coming, but it has so much momentum.
Even though it's slowing down, You're like I have, there's nothing I can do to stop this.
49:22
Speaker 1
Yes, it was, it was, Yeah, it was, it was disturbing.
I thought about leaving the company in late, late 80s because I just, I said I don't get it.
You know, I've been working on this now for 15 years or so.
And, and it became clear this was going to happen.
You could argue about when it was going to happen.
49:39
We had consultants come in all the time.
Even some of the people you mentioned that wrote those books about innovation dilemma and stuff, they would come to Kodak and, and, and, and look at this situation and we could argue whether it was going to be five years, 10 years, you know, that kind of thing.
49:54
And you know, the further out it looks, the less excited people care about the change, even though, you know, what's going to happen and has to do with, well, I'm not, won't be here or whatever, you know, I don't know.
But it's, it's, it's you just can't get people to move.
Even though they say they want to move, they don't move.
50:12
Organizations have such an inertia, especially ones that have been successful, so successful for a long time at the existing technology and the existing business structure.
And it's so hard to move away from that, you know, and, and I think it was very hard for the management to, to make the move.
50:28
I know George Fisher tried very hard to, to, to, to, to imagine a different future for the company.
I know Dan Garp did, and even Antonio Antonio Perez, when he came in, he, he was, he was doing that trying to drive printing kind of thing, you know, so they all got it.
50:44
It was just they couldn't get the organization to move.
50:46
Speaker 2
It goes down as just this historical moment where this massive company kind of went through this massive transition.
And you know, and again, as we spoke about, it affected not only leadership and all the employees of, you know, 100,000 employees that it had, it affected Rochester, the entire ecosystem within that entire community and city.
51:09
And, and in Rochester, you know, as a city is a shell of what it used to be right now.
And in large part because it lost a big part of its identity through Kodak.
You know, there's the remnants it.
51:19
Speaker 1
Didn't have to I mean, I, I think, you know, some decisions they made in the early 90s, you know, about buying Sterling and stuff like that was, was a mistake, right?
And they, they sold it a few years later.
They should have, you know, leveraged what they were good at was material science and coding things.
You know, there's, there's a lot of LCD screens and solar rays and stuff like that.
51:38
I mean, Fuji kind of made that transition.
But but, but, but for some reason, Kodak was reluctant to do that.
I mean, Kodak sold off all of the intellectual, you know, a lot of people don't realize Kodak invented OLED technology and they sold it off.
They just sold it off because they didn't have the money to develop it.
51:55
And I guess, I guess I understand that, but these are the kinds of things that that you saw happening, you know, so they had the technology that they could have leveraged, but for some reason, we didn't force ourselves in that direction, force ourselves to the strength that we had.
52:10
Instead, we sort of wrote this thing down to the dust you.
52:14
Speaker 2
Know and it's a it's unfortunate, I mean it's still the brand, you know is worth, you know, a tremendous amount of money.
And today Kodak operates primarily as a commercial printing and specialty materials and and still film production business.
I think there is obviously a lot that we can take from the past.
52:28
Advice for future generations
And so just to to wind down a little bit, Steven, what kind of advice would you give people in this incredibly fast-paced innovation world that we live in right now where society changes almost monthly?
It's almost impossible to predict what's going to happen in 5 or 10 years.
52:46
So how do you prepare people, future generations, about what they should be thinking about when it comes to innovation and competitiveness within their field?
52:55
Speaker 1
Well, I, I hesitate to give advice because I have a very hard time seeing what's going to happen in the next few years.
The only thing I know that will happen is change and it'll happen faster than you think and it will happen to you.
53:13
A lot of people think it doesn't happen to them.
You know, innovation, everybody supports innovation, you know, until it happens to them And, and then, then of course, then they get resistant to it.
Just just get ready, you know, because you next year and the time frames are different from my experience.
53:33
I, I worked over years and decades.
These, this is months, especially when you look at some of the new technology, AI and stuff.
But it's months and, and maybe a year or two things dramatically change, right?
So everything's going to change and you have to spend a little bit of time in your average day thinking about the coming change.
53:53
I like to use the analogy of the old, old Craftsman used to spend a few minutes everyday sharpening their saws or, or, or fixing their tools or, or refining the thing they used to, to do the next day's work kind of thing.
And they always spent some portion of their time looking at improving their, their machine.
54:11
And I think you'll have to do that constantly now.
You have to think everyday, spend some time thinking about or reading about what's changed today, what's changed this week or this month that could impact me.
And it may come from a totally different field, by the way.
So that makes make your your research diverse.
54:28
And so is the so that you so, so that when it starts to get real, you're it's not so new to you.
You know, you know, you've seen it several times.
You saw it coming.
And so you're more comfortable reacting to it.
And lots of times you may become the evangelist for this new technology, even though you may have nothing to do with its evolution, but but just simply because you were paying attention that that, that, that, that you're, that you're ready to deal with it.
54:52
You know, and then you might lead your organization in this way, even though you're not an expert.
Goes back to that statement I made way at the beginning.
You don't have to be an expert in the field in order to make a contribution to it.
And so so, you know, don't feel like you have to be an expert in order to make a move.
55:08
You just have to be knowledgeable about it and see it coming.
Be humble enough to know that it's might change even what you think and then just keep pushing about that change.
And you have to do it on a more regular basis.
You can't just go to school one year and then five years later think it's going to apply.
55:23
It's it's almost on a daily and a monthly basis, you know.
55:26
Speaker 2
Yeah, I know.
I think there's.
Yeah, that's the best advice you could potentially give to people.
Just kind of be intentional about learning.
And it's so easy to get stuck in your daily routine and the tasks and the chores and the homeworks and so on that you just before you know, the day goes by.
55:42
It's trying to be intentional and setting aside 30 minutes a day to just think, clear your mind, learn about other things.
For me, what's really helped me is just a way of being kind of divergent thinking and seeing patterns across different industries.
Like, Oh, well, you know, I may be working in genomics, but you know, there's this thing that they're doing in digital that might apply and just drawing those connections and, and, and trying to anticipate when something becomes relevant before other people do or before it's too late.
56:10
And, you know, what brings to mind a lot of this, what you're you're talking about in, in our story so far is just, I think Louis Pasteur once said, chance favors a prepared mind.
You don't know what chance is going to happen.
You don't know it's going to come across your way.
But if you prepare your mind, then you're much more likely to see connections and see patterns and, and, and jump on them then if you're not prepared to do so.
56:33
And I think the best we could do is prepare ourselves for that moment and the best way we possibly can, which a lot of times you're blind to it.
So you just have to learn a little bit about a lot of stuff and just have an open mind when something comes your way.
56:45
Speaker 1
I like that quote.
It's a really good quote because it's very, very true.
If you, if you start reading about and looking at all the different and you have access to all this information now.
So that's the good news.
The, the bad news is of course there's the time element to it.
But then you, you know, you use AI to synthesize some of this stuff.
57:03
But the fact is, look at diverse sciences and you know, if you're in the digital field, look at, look at the healthcare field, you know, or look at, look at space communications or something, anything.
Because you know your problem and your brain will latch onto a solution when it sees it, even if it's in a different form with different language or different jargon describing it, you'll say, well, if they can do that with that many elements, I wonder if something like that could apply here.
57:30
It will, it will jar your, your, your creative juices, right?
And then when it starts to impact it, right, you'll be ready for it.
You'll thought about it, you've gotten a little comfortable with it.
And then you'll become the evangelist for your enterprise about this new stuff because nobody else had already done it.
57:45
And all of a sudden you say, well, I've been reading about this and let's you know this is you'll be providing value to your company.
Whether they appreciate it or not, I can't, I can't really say, but but you'll be providing value to them because you did that right?
And it's a, it's a habit really.
It's more than anything else.
58:02
Speaker 2
Steven, thank you so much for sharing your stories.
Clearly you have the awards that recognize everything you did for digital, digital photography.
Kodak wasn't capable of benefiting from that.
But I think society in the world has and and it was a pleasure and privilege to talk to you.
58:18
So thank you so much for your time.
58:20
Speaker 1
Well, thanks.
Thanks for having me on the on the show here.
I appreciate it very much and thanks for your work and highlighting innovation and getting people to think about this.
