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To: Binx Bolling who wrote (8296)	12/3/1999 9:29:00 PM
From: Binx Bolling	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

"the worldwide consumer photography industry is an $80 billion market which has been largely untapped by the Internet" news.cnet.com

To: Binx Bolling who wrote (8296)	12/4/1999 9:49:00 AM
From: Ausdauer	Respond to of 60323

Binx, re: Kodak executive remarks You've got the knack for finding interesting stuff... The mass market is not going to happen until the cost and time of digital imaging isn't [better] than the old model, he said. We don't care when it happens because we make money on every link in the chain. *What about the fact that Epson and HP and Lexmark and Canon are going to be selling photographic paper and consumables in place of traditional developing costs??? What about companies that are offering web hosting for display of photo albums (and who may offer archival services for those precious pictures one wishes to save for eternity)??? **What about digital film??? Ausdauer

To: Binx Bolling who wrote (8296)	12/5/1999 5:21:00 PM
From: Art Bechhoefer	Respond to of 60323

Gustin's remarks would not seem out of line to old line Kodak types in this area (60 miles from Rochester). In fact, Gustin is saying the kinds of things that Kodak likes to believe in order to justify putting most of its research and marketing energy into conventional film. Of course, he's wrong because, for one thing, he's ignoring a market that can't be filled easily by conventional photography - the display, storage, and transmission of photos by computer. It is also interesting to note that Kodak has a color printer for digital, but you rarely see it even in stores in this area. The sad fact of the matter is that Kodak is too locked into conventional photography and not entrepreneurial or motivated enough to be fully competitive in a new field that would draw at least some of its market from conventional film. Better to bumble along with the same old stuff, but still keep your foot in the door in case digital gets so good that no one wants to bother with conventional film and photographic paper. The remarks about digital photography being too difficult for the average person says more about a culture and mentality at Kodak (and other large firms like GM) than it does about the ease or difficulty in using the new technology. Kodak still would like to have intermediaries play a big role in processing images. Thus, heaven in Kodak's universe is a photo store selling film, cameras, developing film and making prints with Kodak chemicals and papers, and preparing digital copies or sending digital images. But the intermediary (using Kodak products most of the time) is still there. The new reality is that people like to be in charge of taking their photos and being able to control what the prints or displays look like. It's analogous to what happened to data processing divisions at large corporations when PC networks began to substitute for mainframes. The intermediary generally becomes "redundant," as they like to say in England. Kodak has so much tied up, both in capital and in their culture in intermediaries that it is going to be very, very difficult for them to break out of this mold.