Kodak should have ruled the digital imaging space. Instead, they collapsed.

A lot of it was because the film people kneecapped the digital folks.

Film was very profitable.

Until it wasn't.

The company that I worked for, was a classic film company. When digital was first getting a foothold (early 1990s), I used to get lectures about how film would never die...etc.

A few years later, it was as if film never existed. The transition was so sudden, and so complete, that, if you blinked, you missed it.

Years later, I saw the same kind of thing happen to my company, that happened to Kodak.

The iPhone came out, with its embedded camera, and that basically killed the discrete point-and-shoot market, which was very profitable for my company.

When the iPhone first came out, the marketing folks at my company laughed at it.

Then, they stopped laughing.