Another proud photo brand goes bankrupt - Polaroid

Another sign of being in the wrong part of a changing industry. Certainly we have far more cameras and far more instant photography and far more pictures per human being, than ten, twenty or thirty years ago. You'd think that being in the camera or related industries would be a very lucrative opportunity. Yet another proud photography brand - Polaroid - announced its bankruptcy this past weekend. (We've chronicled earlier of the demise of such camera giants as Minolta and Konica).

There was a time when a Polaroid picture was magic. I'm old enough to remember the old format Polaroids, that had the paper cover, that you had to wait - perhaps 90 seconds, or something like that - and then peel away the cover paper, to see your picture. Still, that seemed like magic back then in the 1970s when there were no one-hour instant photo develping of film cameras, and digital cameras were decades into the future. Back then (in Finland at least) a typical camera film development took a week. And pictures were so expensive, that many developed the negative first without the pictures - and then selected which photographs to print out of the negative, so you would not waste money on the very expensive individual prints. So it would take easily two or three weeks to get your finished photographs from your neighborhood chemist (drug store) - and yes, there were black-and-white films and photographs, which were significantly cheaper than colour film and pictures. Even Polaroid had black-and-white instant photographs and the rare and very expensive colour photographs on their technology back then.

Polaroid was a giant company once and a major player in the photography business, part of the print media industry. They were generally very healthy in a niche market of the industry, selling both their iconic cameras and the film. Now they are going through bankruptcy (for the second time already). They are not really exiting the photography business, but they sure are in trouble.

And its not that instant photography had somehow gone out of style, like the hoola hoop, the Rubic's cube and the Yo-Yo. We all carry around our cameraphones - there are 1.9 billion of those on the planet (and something like 200 million "real" stand-alone digital cameras in use) - we snap our instant photos on our cameraphones, and we don't print them out, we show our friends that picture on the screen of our phone, and perhaps - rarely - we share that picture with a friend and if so, typically via bluetooth, so there are no transmission charges either. Not a good time to be someone who'se business depends on printing instant pictures.

Comments

[johan rhodin]

Hi! Great post. I like the possibility of Photo-Twitter, like MoYoMe or Twitpic.
And I still think there is a business for print of photos. We're definitliy going to see more of services like PhotoBuch.de

[Brendan Dunphy]

Polaroid is another sad example of the failure to adapt and to deal with disruption. Like those in the industry that proceeded it into bankruptcy, Polaroid never managed to move beyond what it already knew, harness and focus its people to take their knowledge and expertise in other domains (as Fuji has done) or ride the disruptive wave itself with at least some success. The future belongs to the agile, not the strong, and what are seen as assets one day can quickly turn toxic the next in any industry, not just finance.

See Innovation Insight #2 at http://brendandunphy.blogspot.com/2008/04/innovation-insight-2-your-own-skills.html for a Jeff Bezos (of Amazon)perspective on the topic of adaption.

[Tomi T Ahonen]

Hi Johan and Brendan

Johan - great point and yes, there is certainly a significant market also for prints. But it used to be that almost all pictures "taken" were also developed into pictures. In the age of the 35mm film based camera, the developers soon offered packages that it didn't make sense NOT to develop every print.

Today there are 1.9 billion cameraphones in use, and only under 200 million digital cameras. The cameraphones are the only camera for the vast majority of the global population. If they want a picture, they snap it on the phone (or digital camera). And these tend not to leave the phone. Most snapped pics on digital cameras and cameraphones remain on the device, are perhaps shown to some others, and deleted off the camera.

Then of the remainder, the majority only are copied electronically and perhaps shared via memory stick or bluetooth or uploaded to Flickr or Facebook etc. Very few of those end up printed.

Yes, we still like our printed pictures, and some end up baby picture calendars and the few special moment prints of the wedding or birthday etc. But most no longer are printed...

And the printing opportunity itself is then expanding to home-printing with the PC printer and various higher quality papers and printer cartridges etc.

Brendan - good point and yes, this was a disaster that very bizarrely Polaroid didn't react to in time. I think the for us who follow digital convergence like you and me, it was obvious for years. Perhaps inside Polaroid they somehow remained just focused on their core business and old metrics and perhaps felt isolated from the digital trends, thinking a polaroid picture was something very "protected" from the risk of cannibalization..

Thank you both for posting the comments.

Tomi Ahonen :-)