Regarding Kodak's missed chance, one factor in Kodak's strategy was to find a way to protect their conventional 35mm film business. If they had gone full force into digital, they would have reduced demand for conventional film much sooner, and that appears to be the reason they did not go whole heartedly into digital at a time when it would have made them the dominant player. This "looking back" attitude came about because Kodak has become less and less entrepreneurial.
The area where I live is full of Kodak retirees, and especially the higher ranking ones (all of whom live on a lake, where property values are quite high). The source of information I received on Kodak came from a retiree who probably knew what he was talking about, but it doesn't mean the strategy taken by Kodak is the right one. In fact, the strategy, if indeed Kodak really aims to send photos by wireless to a host computer, where the user can direct that prints be made, or simply send copies to friends via email, seems to me another example of "looking back" to an age where you snapped the picture and brought it to the neigborhood drug store for processing -- a strategy where most likely the film, processing chemicals, and prints were all on Kodak products.
Where Kodak has gone wrong, in my view, is insisting on the middleman between the picture taker and the picture. With computers as well developed as they are today, and with good quality color printers available at reasonable cost, almost any picture taker can also make prints and send email copies without need of an intermediate person or source to tend to the details (at a cost considerably higher than doing it yourself). As a serious amateur, I also don't think much of the idea of sending images via wireless phone to a host computer. First of all, I tend to make most photos at a resolution high enough for quality prints. I recently sent an email that required more then 10 minutes transmission time for highest resolution JPEG format. I certainly don't want to sit around waiting 10 minutes to transmit one photo when I'm in the field. Even if wireless eventually gets faster (I'm talking about transmitting at least 1 mb file size), I prefer storing the image on an almost indestructible removable flash card, and I can't see much attraction for other technologies, at least for three or four years.
In short, I think the removable flash card is the primary technology and wireless transmission, from files in smaller size embedded memory, is definitely secondary.
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