Eastman Kodak - Rochester Wiki

Eastman Kodak, referred to colloquially as "Kodak," is a large multinational corporation founded in Rochester by George Eastman, with corporate headquarters in downtown Rochester, near High Falls. Kodak also maintains research facilities and some manufacturing in Kodak Park, near the City of Rochester-Greece Border on Lake Ave and Ridge Road, and other locations throughout the area. Kodak, like Xerox, was the basis of the Rochester economy for many years, until the digital camera made Kodak's consumer film products obsolete.

Eastman Kodak has primarily dealt with photographic products, but has, in the past expanded into other areas, such as batteries, photocopiers, medical imaging, and chemicals. While many of these ventures failed, the chemical divison, headquarted in Kingsport, TN, was successful enough to be spun off in 1994, and is today a thriving company and one of the world's leading sources of polymeric materials.

Kodak has also seen many other failures in its history, including

an attempt to market an instant photography system in the 1980s, which was stopped by a patent infringement suit filed by the Polaroid Company
Disc film, a replacement to the very popular Instamatic 110 camera line, but was unsuccessful, probably due to the complexity of the film system, and the very small negetive size
APS (Advanced Photo System), designed to provide a more user-friendly system for snapshot photography. A joint effort between many large photographic companies, it failed due to the rapid growth of the digital imaging market.

It has been said that Eastman Kodak also failed to realize the potential of the digital imaging boom in the late 1990s. This is somewhat true, as Kodak did not begin to market digital cameras until the market was fairly established. However, Kodak has become the #1 seller of digital cameras in the United States, with 24% of the market share¹. Kodak has also applied its vast knowledge of photographic print displays to the inkjet and digital photograpic printing field.

The recent growth in Kodak digital imaging, notwithstanding, Kodak's worldwide employment base has shrunk dramatically in the past ten years², and this has been felt especially here in Rochester, where Kodak had been the top employer for many years. Whole plants have been closed (such as Kodak Elmgrove in Gates) or divisions have been sold off (such as the Space and Aerial Imaging division, located at Kodak Hawkeye on St. Paul Street ³). Indeed, even Kodak Park, which operated much like a small city unto itself, has been greatly reduced as its intended purpose, the manufacture of film and photo paper, has become almost obsolete. Even with all this downsizing, Kodak remained the #2 employer in the Rochester area for a short while, but it fell to #3 in 2006⁴ and will most probably never regain the level of employment that it had in the late 1980s.

Notes and References

Local Twitter search results for ''from:KodakCB''

Heading out for Vermont for the Burton Snowboarding US Open - look for tweets & blog posts from the Kodak tent on the mountain! ^{kodakCB, Rochester, NY, 14 hours, 35 minutes ago}

@jhoetzl interesting - I'll pas that along ^{kodakCB, Rochester, NY, 14 hours, 36 minutes ago}

@TheArtsAlliance because our brand is all about sharing and real people so it makes sense to have us be out there! ^{kodakCB, Rochester, NY, 14 hours, 36 minutes ago}

120050817 BUSINESS Article D&C - dead link now
2Kodak cuts 15,000 jobs & buys Chinon - Digital Photography Review 22 January 2004
320040814 BUSINESS D&C Article - dead link now
4Rochester%2C_NY#Top_private_employers

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