Setting the Record Straight: Kodak Digital History

Ready to uncover the journey from film to digital photography? In this episode, Gary Pageau of the Dead Pixels Society talks with four former Eastman Kodak Co. executives - Ben Gibson, Bill Jackson, Mike McDougall, and Craig McGowan - who were there on the front lines of early consumer digital imaging.

In this conversation, our very first panel discussion traverses the winding path from film to digital, dissecting the trials and triumphs that marked this monumental shift. The panel describes the challenges faced by the evolution of Kodak's business units and the challenges they faced. The panel elaborates on Kodak's entry into consumer electronics and its strategic partnerships with Japanese manufacturers.

Finally, we retrospectively analyze Kodak's digital legacy. Hear the guests' candid views on Kodak's strategic choices, branding hurdles, and enduring technologies that continue to influence today's market. Gain insight into the transformation of a business model and the complexities involved in this p

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Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Peugeot. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by MediaClip, advertek Printing and IP Labs.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast. Today we've got an unusual and first format change for the podcast. We actually have our first panel of I don't know if you've called them contestants or you call them wise people with a lot of perspective but we've got four gentlemen from Florida with the Eastman Kodak. We're going to share some perspectives on a topic probably near and dear to everybody's heart in the imaging industry, which is the transition from film as the base technology for the photography industry onto digital. Next we're going to start with we're going to do some introductions at the panel so everyone knows who we're talking to. Ben Gibson, can you tell us who you are and what you're doing now and what you were doing at Kodak?

Ben Gibson: 1:05

Yeah, so Ben Gibson, and interesting introduction to Kodak. I am an engineer and I was working on really geeky stuff at GE and with submarines and radars and sonars, and Kodak hired me because I could do real time firmware and I worked on photo CD and CD writers and scanners and a lot of the stuff they were trying to do in real time real fast.

Ben Gibson: 1:27

So just a succession of positions in the digital side of Kodak ultimately led to being the CTO of digital and film imaging and led the restructuring of R&D during the restructuring in the later years. So I've been exposed to pretty much the entire company through my years. I excuse me, I left in 2010, took some, did some marketing and I now do consulting. I'm actually involved in the industry. I have clients who are pretty big players in photography and film and other places which I'm seeing the Renaissance which is happening but nobody is fooled to think that film is 85% or 85 times smaller than it was at its peak right.

Ben Gibson: 2:11

So, or they're about, so nobody's fooled to think it is coming back, but it certainly is relevant and growing again and it's a good business. So so I dabble and you know, talk, talk on podcasts whenever I can, right.

Gary Pageau: 2:26

Second career for many people Mike McDougall, who I was in practically constant contact with back in my days at PMA. Mike, tell the audience who, who you are and what you did and what you're doing now.

Mike McDougall: 2:39

Sure Well, thanks Gary. I see is Ben said. I kind of came into Kodak related manner. I was consulting for the company on their B2B products commercial scanning back in the late 90s and then got hired right around 2003 to come in and I was the director of public relations for consumer digital products and services cameras up through the ink generation. So I kind of rode that crest up and watched the wave break as well, that there went to another large multinational to run communications globally and then for the past 12 years I've owned a public relations and brand consultancy from and winning.

Mike McDougall: 3:24

Oh well, thanks, Thanks.

Ben Gibson: 3:26

And.

Mike McDougall: 3:26

Kodak, the new Kodak, the very different Kodak, as a client of mine, but not a topic of this podcast.

Gary Pageau: 3:32

Absolutely not.

Ben Gibson: 3:33

Yeah, ditto.

Gary Pageau: 3:37

Bill Jackson. I kind of screwed up the alphabetical order there, but tell us a little bit about what you did at Kodak and what you're doing.

Bill Jackson: 3:45

So I was. I was hired into Kodak, into the digital business, and my job and my initial job was there to go find small companies that the, the business, could invest in, that had products that were ancillary to cameras, and made some, some early investments into some you know oddball stuff that you know tried to help build the, the momentum for digital capture.

Bill Jackson: 4:16

So today convinced my boss to turn the software into a almost into a business and launch the easy share software brand as part of the easy share software program, and worked actually worked a lot with Craig on that and after that sort of had run its course, I joined the intellectual property licensing team and was for going out and torturing mobile phone companies over the code and portfolio Motor. All now is I'm completely out of the tech industry. I own a beer distributor in West.

Gary Pageau: 4:56

Nice consumable to consumable, as we say.

Bill Jackson: 5:01

But you know the nice thing about beers no one ever brings it back.

Gary Pageau: 5:03

There you go, hopefully, and no firmware updates either. Now to the instigator of this little kind of Craig McGowan. We saw how we saw this whole thing started was. There was a Facebook post where Craig was talking about how he encountered in a social situation someone who knew everything about Kodak and consult could have solved everything. If only they were CEO back then. Craig, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you did at Kodak and what you're doing now?

Craig McGowan: 5:33

Yeah, I'm sure we'll get to that topic in a while. I started Kodak in 92 as a lead software engineer in commercial imaging actually high volume scanning and spent five or six years really before consumer photography was a thing. Wasn't really ready at that point yet, but sometime around the year 2000 or so I switched from the commercial imaging side to consumer and I worked in a few different areas. I started out in the easy share software group, working with Bill and progress through online services and then into some consumer digital products like digital picture frames and sort of things like that. Currently I'm a professor at RIT. I teach entrepreneurship.

Gary Pageau: 6:34

Awesome, awesome, well, great, well, listen, guys welcome. Thanks for making time. I know it wasn't easy finding time and all your busy schedules Bill's got beer to deliver, for God's sake, so let's get right into this. So when you talk about digital and Kodak at one time those words were synonymous. Today, I think if you talk to the average consumer, they know the phrase Kodak Moments.

Gary Pageau: 6:59

They may remember Kodak film and they may remember back then kind of this is the you know the Steve Stasson myth where he invented the first digital camera and Kodak never capitalized on it. Now we all know that that is absolutely false, that Kodak did market and capitalize on that. But before we get into that sort of thing, can you talk a little bit about what the market was like in the 90s when digital was starting to happen? You know Kodak was considered actually a kind of a player in digital at the time. I think in that era there was a book I think was Apple Confidential. They were talking about where Kodak was actually looking to buy Apple computer at the time. So, Craig, since you kind of came on board in that era as a software person, what drew you to Kodak?

Craig McGowan: 7:46

Well, you know that was a really interesting time to be in the technology industry. You know we personal computers were coming out pretty well established by that time. The internet was just in its very nascent phase and it's really really exciting time. I was thrilled to join Kodak and be part of the digital photography revolution. I didn't, I mean, I didn't know where it was going to go. I just knew it was going to go somewhere and so, yeah, that was a great ride. Where was digital going to go At the time? Currently, computers are pretty underpowered. The internet obviously wasn't capable of handling we were. We were sending files over phone lines at very low speeds. We didn't know where it was going to go.

Gary Pageau: 8:33

It was the wild west. It was the wild west. That's what. That's what people didn't go and understand.

Craig McGowan: 8:37

Now, looking back, then it seems obvious, right, yeah it might have taken what two minutes to render a JPEG on your screen back then.

Gary Pageau: 8:46

Exactly At 640, by whatever Right, so so. So, bill, you came in, you were in the easy share side. What was? What was your perception of, kind of like, the challenges that had to be overcome from a technology market standpoint? Because, as we were talking before the call, you know, those early digital cameras didn't even have the processing power, you know, to actually finish the file. They shot a raw file and then it had to be processed on a host computer. You had to connect it to the software to do that. Can you talk a little bit about? You know, because there were no standards back then and no one really knew if this was going to take off in any significant way.

Bill Jackson: 9:22

Yeah, and I came in in 97. And I don't know, yeah, 97., and that was the year that they Kodak announced the first megapixel digital camera with a display on it and that was the. Dc one to 10.

Mike McDougall: 9:40

Right.

Bill Jackson: 9:40

Right, which was, you know, it was really a groundbreaking camera from the same point marketplace I you know it was like a thousand bucks or 900 bucks or some some big number Right. And so standards were starting to arrive. You know there were, there were things that a lot of people would Kodak had worked on regarding finished files and exf data and all that other stuff that had gone into the cameras, and so that you know, things started to progress relatively quickly from there. You know, being in the camera business, as Craig said, was really exciting, but no one had any idea where that thing was going to end up.

Mike McDougall: 10:21

Right.

Bill Jackson: 10:22

We were after point and shoot cameras, the Kodak professional guys were still doing the SLRs, making making things out of Canon and Nikon bodies. But you know, from the standpoint of a lot of the other things that you rely upon today, there just wasn't it. Right.

Ben Gibson: 10:40

It had to be all just to get.

Bill Jackson: 10:42

Just to give an example, at one point we did a project to put a cellular modem into a camera and you know, see if consumers would like that, and we tested it. I mean, I, the cell phone bill for those I think it was 20 cameras we tested with consumers was $10,000 a month, right, and so you know, you get. You get some really weird results when people get stuff like that in their hands. They liked it, but they we had no idea whether or not you know you would be sending images over cell phone networks.

Gary Pageau: 11:16

And who could have predicted a $25 cell phone bill like we have now?

Bill Jackson: 11:19

Yeah, and you know, like I said, back then we were begging with the carriers to do to only send the data at two o'clock in the morning so that we wouldn't have to pay a fortune for it. Right, you know it was. It was a very strange time trying to figure out where that was all going to go, and I think Kodak did a lot of stuff right. They also had a lot of things going against them to be successful in digital imaging business, Right.

Gary Pageau: 11:48

Now, ben, you came from another high tech atmosphere coming into this environment and again, you know, kodak was seen as a as a hot high tech company, right, you know, I don't remember exactly when George Fisher came in, but that was like really, you know, woke people up that Kodak was trying to break the mold and get into digital. Is that what brought you to the company, and was that actually true, or was that more of a face saving thing?

Ben Gibson: 12:15

Well, I, I, I started in in 1992 myself right at the end of 1991 and George Fisher wasn't there yet.

Ben Gibson: 12:22

He didn't um for several years. So so Kodak, was Kodak really believed that, you know, digital cameras weren't a thing yet? I mean, bill made all the right points, right, you think about all the things that requires to take a digital imaging today. Most of that was not in place yet. So the idea was okay, we'll, we'll scan film at Qualex and have a digital, you know, put it on a CD, because CDs were were starting to emerge and and that was a was a really good idea, right. So but coming to Kodak at that time, I mean I have to kind of echo what what Craig said. I mean, here's a company that had almost an unlimited supply of money, that was investing billions of dollars in this industry, right, and I think one of the things in retrospect was we never really knew which category was going to take, take hold or how big that category was going to be. I don't think any of the, the external market reports ever got the the size of the market correct, right.

Ben Gibson: 13:21

So, here you have Kodak, you know, throwing billions of dollars at multiple things and making tremendous amount of progress, writing a lot of patents, but not really knowing that we were going to end up. You know, on an iPhone, you know, with with an imager and unlimited, you know, image processing stuff associated with it.

Gary Pageau: 13:44

And Mike, you were coming in from sort of the marketing angle right when you had to try and convince people that you know Kodak was a legitimate brand in this new space that was just developing. What was that like?

Mike McDougall: 13:57

There were a couple of things we had to contend with. Right One, we did have a bit of a digital legacy in the photographer right when I came in in that early 2000s. You know we have momentum behind us through the work of, you know, the folks here on the phone or the the call and quite a few others. But we faced a different set of competitors, especially in the consumer realm, right, you know you feel your cannon, but Sony right. So Sony at that time Sony is not just an imaging company, right they're?

Mike McDougall: 14:23

a consumer electronics company right Panasonic. So we're in a CE space right. Playing that game. But now we had a lot of success. Right, thanks, really, really well. But it was a very different competitive set with a whole different set of business realities, whether from margin to distribution to you know the products we prefer to as produce, right, they'd expire. I mean you had to constantly refresh and come out. That was a whole different business.

Gary Pageau: 15:20

So let's talk a little bit about that. In terms of the core business of CE being very different than the chemical based business of Eastman, kodak is at its core. Eastman Kodak is a chemical company, right they? They coat things on flat surfaces at incredible speeds in darkness, with perfect quality, right that? That you know? That's primarily what you know. Kodak for 80 some years, up until the digital era, was best known for. How did the company decide that they were going to kind of, you know, have to invest in this relatively low margin, unproven business and no one's jumping up with that, no, I think they did on that one, I think they well, yeah, go ahead.

Ben Gibson: 16:04

Well, I think they decided because they had to, right. I mean, I don't think you know that's where it was going, even though they didn't know what was in that path. They knew that was the general direction, right. But I think you're onto a really interesting point about if you look at film. You know there were two things. You could buy anywhere in the world, right. You could buy a Roll of Kodak film in a can of Coca-Cola, right. And it didn't matter politics or anything else, right. And the distribution was three and a half turns a year, 65 or 70 points of margin on a roll of film, and the material velocity of that, you know, at a $15 billion revenue, was tremendous. And digital was, you know, 12 countries, 20 points of margin, 12 turns a year. And Mike mentioned the launch and ramp down, refresh product, refresh, right. So you just weren't getting any. You know you invent a roll of film. I mean, there is still film being sold today that was invented in the you know, 1980s, right.

Ben Gibson: 17:01

You know, color Plus is the old VR emulsion from the disc camera. You know, rumor has it right. So that's a long shelf life for a product, right. So the cash conversion and the ability to generate cash from your inventions were really one of the things that you know. Kodak probably had a good handle on the product side. They didn't have a good handle on the cash flow side. Right, and how to move products through a different supply chain. Right and a different value chain, and that was a huge problem, huge problem.

Bill Jackson: 17:33

And I'll add something to what Ben said. In reality they didn't have a whole lot of choices in the imaging world other than to go into the low margin. And you know, like Ben said, 20 points, and I'd say that's on a good day, going downhill with the wind behind your back.

Bill Jackson: 17:53

But you know, because in reality a lot of the groundwork and the path was laid probably in the mid 50s, because Kodak at the time was enjoined by the government from bundling processing with film, and so what that created was that created a monster in the retail channels that were making a lot of money finishing film and they didn't want to give it up Right, and so Kodak didn't have a lot of room to maneuver Right To go towards that. And you know I think Ben was in this meeting where we sat in the big conference room with the round table and we had received a letter from one of the major retailers saying, basically, stop this digital shit or we're going to stop selling your film. And you know that was a real threat to a serious business that was spewing, it was spinning off a lot of cash.

Ben Gibson: 18:59

It was a license to print money until 2001.

Bill Jackson: 19:02

Yeah, and so you know that whole thing was set in motion because of what happened back in the mid 50s.

Craig McGowan: 19:11

Right.

Bill Jackson: 19:12

And when that consent decree was lifted in the late 90s, that structure was already in place, with the retail side of finishing, even though Kodak was doing most of the work at their Qualex labs. Right, it didn't matter, all the money was being made by the retailers and that was something that they were not going to let go of easily.

Gary Pageau: 19:37

For those who are not up on their Kodak legal history the consent decrees basically, as I recall 1921, 1954, I think were the two that were probably the biggest ones prevented Kodak from tying the sale of film and processing together so consumers could buy a bundle, which today seems kind of ridiculous. But it basically created the wholesale and independent photo finishing industry by doing that, because Kodak in the 20s and 30s had to go out in the 1950s, had to go out and tell independence. This is how you they basically had to give away the technology and create the independent industry and it made a lot of people, a lot of money, but it also did impact Kodak's business going forward. So just a little educational point there.

Bill Jackson: 20:26

Yeah. So when you get into the 90s and the imaging starts switching towards digital, what lane is left for Kodak? Other than what they could have said is we're not gonna throw billions of dollars after a consumer electronics model and so we're gonna go invest in sterling drug or something like that, which they did. We're gonna let digital imaging go to the other guys, which would have been heresy. I couldn't imagine that happening in that company.

Craig McGowan: 20:59

I mean one thing we did know back in those days was that people wanted to share their pictures and, besides, whether it was a print or whether it was on the back of their camera or something else could be determined. We had a great understanding of how people took pictures and used pictures and we knew that when things went digital, some things were gonna remain constant People who take pictures, the main motivation to take pictures for them most people is sharing and we did focus on that.

Gary Pageau: 21:37

Yeah, the whole Kodak share button. That was your whole value.

Bill Jackson: 21:43

But again, that whole thing was stymied by the retailers. Right, right, we, Kodak, built a massive infrastructure to host photo sharing. We called it retailercom, but on separate retailer websites we built the infrastructure, let them brand it. And we had this massive argument internally about whether or not we were gonna use the United Airlines Star Alliance model or the walled garden model, and the retailers did not. If you got your film developed or your pictures developed at Walmart or Walgreens or whatever, they did not want you to be able to look at that stuff from anywhere other than their website. Right?

Ben Gibson: 22:24

right.

Bill Jackson: 22:25

And it was a massive battle.

Ben Gibson: 22:27

So can I add a point? I wanna add a point to this about retailers, because I kind of suspected this might come up. So I reread Kodak's bankruptcy filing from 2012,. Right, and in the creditor list it had $54 million of trade debt to Motion Picture Studios and it had $20 million of trade debt to retailers like Target, cvs, walmart all these people that we're talking to. So this machine that was a license to print money and they gladly shared those co-op dollars with studios and retailers and everybody else. There was nothing to share with digital and the retailers basically said well then, we're not gonna play with you unless you give us all that money. And, of course, the company's kind of stuck and said, okay, well, we'll bet on the come and the revenue will be here at some point and we'll still give you that money. And what they did is they ended up creating. I mean, imagine having trade debt to your customers in your bankruptcy filing. I mean, how many times does that happen? And there's quite a bit of it in there. It's pretty amazing.

Bill Jackson: 23:36

And that's, by the way, you just hit something that always struck me at Kodak right All of the people you know they grew up in Kodak and came from the film side they always referred to Walmart or Walgreens or Right Aid or those guys as customers and they were not focused on the real customers who were putting their dollars down and buying a role of film as much as they were on making sure that Walmart was happy and you know I always used to argue with them and say that's not your customer at your channel.

Bill Jackson: 24:10

Pay attention to it, but it was a thing that went on in Kodak for years and years and years that they would do customer satisfaction reports and they would go interview the purchasing guy at Walmart.

Craig McGowan: 24:24

And all of this discussion is really based on the idea that the future revenues and digital were going to be printing. Right, it's going to be based on printing and we're going to come through those channels.

Gary Pageau: 24:34

I think what's interesting, you know, working at PMA, you know our members were primarily what you know Bill is referencing as the customer and they would tell us well, kodak's not even listening to us, so there's clearly a disconnect there.

Ben Gibson: 24:47

Yeah, we're not listening to them. Asked for $20 million.

Ben Gibson: 24:50

I mean that's the that was the problem and you know, Craig, to your point, I mean you know a lot of people when they reflect back on Kodak, they see it as a product portfolio issue, like if Kodak made this product, everything would have been fine. There's no company out there today making those products we talked about. That is Apple or or well, except the Apple making cameras, right. But the point is is that when you look at our competitors at the time, there's none of them in this space that built the products we didn't and then are flourishing right. So you know, it was really all these subtle things like the material velocity of you know, they mentioned earlier that the retail deals that were being made in the marketplace and all that kind of stuff were huge, probably bigger factors than anything else.

Mike McDougall: 25:32

Mike, and I think that too, ben and Craig and Bill, you brought up right the the view of you know some legacy Kodak teams was culture and how different parts of a large multinational business would view other parts. Right, and how you haven't worked together. Right, you had the legacy film business. You had the motion picture business. Right, you had the digital time, digital and applied imaging. You know that consumer digital group yeah, then we acquired Ofoto. My gosh and I thought we were, you know, tech savvy, right, polo shirt wearing, separated by 13 miles from the mothership. Then we bought Ofoto and went out to Berkeley and realized that we knew nothing. Right, here they are in the Bay Area. This is a different type of culture and I do and it's not to blame I don't think we actually managed how to bring those cultures together and to focus on what needed to carry the company forward.

Ben Gibson: 26:28

Even if we had those businesses don't really exist. I mean Shutterfly. I mean Shutterfly is has a lot of stress right now, right, and you know these. It's not like one of these businesses took off and became a multi-billion dollar business and we missed the boat. It's like there was no boat, right.

Gary Pageau: 26:48

The bunch of little canoes is. There was no single boat Right.

Bill Jackson: 26:53

The business model for Shutterfly and for Ofoto and for printed Kodak, and all of that relied upon people printing a certain percentage of the images every month in order to keep those things spinning on discs, consuming power and network balance as that, as that cache of online phone came increasingly difficult to monitor and you know, if you look at someone like Facebook, they have monetized it in a very different way, right, right, and you're getting someone else to pay for your free storage.

Gary Pageau: 27:30

Right.

Bill Jackson: 27:31

And it's the same thing that Google did with Gmail and and you know, other people are doing with other things, right they're? They're monetizing it through advertising, and that was not something in the Kodak lingon.

Gary Pageau: 27:45

I've heard that more than once where you know, if Kodak would have only invented Instagram, everything would have been fixed, and I think it was a business model challenge. I think Kodak probably would have said okay, if you want, you have to subscribe to Instagram, there will be no ads, right.

Bill Jackson: 28:00

Well, I mean, I was involved in the first picture frame that Kodak did a long time and we had a massive debate as to whether or not we were going to engrave the Kodak logo on the wood frame around the outside of the frame, because there were people that said, god damn it, people don't want that brand name on their pictures, right, and I mean, this is this was not a small conversation. Now, ultimately, we did engrave it, but there was that attitude that you don't mess with people's pictures by trying to brand them. You know. Meanwhile, you know, facebook puts their name on everything.

Craig McGowan: 28:42

Facebook came out in 2007 and they went without advertising for quite a while before they actually started mixing advertising into the news feed. They were very scared of advertising as well, but if we look at things now, probably all the sharing, all the picture sharing revenue that's out there, is based on advertising.

Mike McDougall: 29:08

So here you brought up Instagram, right. And what if Kodak had created Instagram? I mean, Craig, I think you were in this conversation, number five of us one day that said, hey, shouldn't we apply our film emotions to our digital files? Right, and use that legacy. And back to your question of you put Kodak on the frame. There was very vocal feedback from a unit saying, no, you're not going to touch our emotions on this digital side, those are ours, right. So culture wasn't only to blame, but it played a factor, right. Yeah, again, it's. How do you unite a team, how do you unite a company to do something with focus? Because, as we started right, there's so many opportunities. We were trying to pursue them all, and that becomes a model for failure.

Ben Gibson: 29:52

I was going to add. There was kind of two sacred cows in the culture that existed from the beginning. One of them was that the customer owns the photo and it's private right. And so, like I saw demos in the 90s and the early 90s scanners where we could do semantic understanding of high rate scanning at Qualex and say, okay, there's a dog in that picture, let's throw an Alpo coupon in there and charge Alpo for the coupon, and it was like we can't do that. That is like breaking the sacred bond of we're looking at your pictures, right, I mean, that was a religious, you know. So the whole business model that ended up being Instagram and Facebook was something that you know. I should be the only one that determines where my picture gets shared. Everything Kodak built in the sharing space was about the owner of the picture sharing the picture.

Ben Gibson: 30:41

And this idea of going viral or sharing somebody's picture, of a picture, of a picture which is basically prevalent today was not there right, and the business models were built around something that Kodak was not willing to do back in the day, maybe for all the right reasons, right.

Gary Pageau: 30:57

Well, yeah, I mean, that was a cultural change, right. And I remember back then and that was what do you mean you can share my picture from Facebook to someone else and not ask my permission, right the?

Ben Gibson: 31:06

photographer owns the photo. That's part of the religion, right.

Gary Pageau: 31:10

Craig Craig, you mentioned something before. I wanted to touch on this idea of the expectations that people would print right. I think the expectations were that people were going to print more than they would right, that they were kind of in this behavior of you know, I'm going to print and it may not be a one to one, but they're going to print more than they were. What was that based on? As we know from Film World, people were not people. If they shot 24 or 36, you know, maybe half of those were crap.

Craig McGowan: 32:14

Yeah, well, so digital cameras. Remember your first digital camera. The great thing about it was after you took the picture. You could see whether the picture turned out good or not. You can see people. People loved that screen on the back. So really the thought back in that era early 2000s era was this is a better camera, but people are still going to want to print their good pictures. They might not want to print all of them and let's use the digital camera, which is a low margin business, to leverage our way into a higher margin business, which was printing and people are always going to want to print.

Ben Gibson: 32:56

Right, here's an interesting point on that, right. So when you had film, you had to print your pictures and they would actually send you and say, okay, we're going to do print two prints for every picture. What we found like when I was at picture vision if you remember that name before Ofoto, you know we started looking at what were people actually printing, right, high-value the prints. They would come back and high-value a print, right, but it was like maybe two of 25 or something like that, right? So if you didn't print anything, you would get two prints out of a roll of film when you were scanning the film, if that's all you allowed as digital.

Ben Gibson: 33:32

Came up the number of high value prints in terms of. You know, if I had 100 high value prints myself or pictures myself, I might still print those 100 prints. I wasn't printing the percentage. I now take significantly more pictures than I used to take because I was constrained. So if even if you look, Gary, at the size of the printing market today, it hasn't moved much in terms of you know that kind of high, you know pie of what people are printing in their gifts and in their and their other. You know the prints and gifts and photo books and all that kind of stuff, that's that group of high value prints that is still kind of the same number of prints that that has been in place. Even going back to film, right, it's just now there's a trillion pictures being taken instead of you know, a few billion or a couple hundred million, right. So, and that's one of the that's one of the challenges the industry is still facing is how do we activate printing, right?

Gary Pageau: 34:25

Exactly that was one of the things I was. I was trying to get to with my question to Craig was you know, the challenge is, you've seen the picture, so your impetus to print is decreased because at least you know you got it and you can. Why can't print it later? And then later never comes, or doesn't come until there's an occasion to print Right.

Craig McGowan: 34:45

And now even grandma has a phone that she can look at the pictures on, so you don't have to print the chair with grandma anymore. She's got it. She's got her iPhone and she can view it there.

Mike McDougall: 34:56

So everybody's got a screen Right. It's funny you mentioned that, craig, a name that somebody know, ben Rand, who was a long time to cover code Right. Yeah, he and I joke that our homes. You can tell where the printing behavior stopped because our kids are 12 years old. For the rest of time, you know I'm not. I have pictures up here of my kids who are in their 20s, who are probably 12 and 13.

Gary Pageau: 35:19

But you have a digital picture frame that I'll change, right, bill.

Mike McDougall: 35:22

Well, digital, we thought that would write a picture viewer that we had, but it's a great point. Right, it's the phone. Other devices came into play. Kodak no longer drove that ecosystem. Right, right, there was a different ecosystem, being driven by a much greater set of players, and back to business model. That wasn't the model that Kodak had really grown up on.

Bill Jackson: 35:43

I'd separate some very specific and, by the way, it also wasn't a place where Kodak's brand had the license to play. I mean, I remember Kodak did a survey, probably three or four years into my tenure there. They went out and surveyed a bunch of consumers and said if you could relate a brand to a famous person, who would you pick? And they said you know Sony. And I'll still remember this to this day. You guys probably remember this too. The answer for Sony was Will Smith. You know cool, hip, nice guy.

Bill Jackson: 36:23

And remember when they were presenting this to the people at Kodak, the next one got a lot of laughs, right. They said what do you think about HP? And the answer was Al Gore. He was boring, stayed, but you know, reliable. And all the Kodak people laughed and they said, ok, what about Kodak? And the answer was Andy Griffith.

Bill Jackson: 36:42

And so it's like oh shit, you know we can't. I'm sorry I don't you're recording this, but we can't play in some of those areas. We just the consumer, would not have allowed Kodak to, for instance, build a mobile phone and be successful with it. I don't think they would have ever done it. And then I was given a project when I was in the IP group to go out and figure out how Apple got into the mobile phone business without being sued for IP. Because, face it, nokia, motorola, samsung, those guys they had all the IP locked, lockdown pretty good for a mobile phone. And Apple's attitude basically was screw it. We're going to build a better mobile phone and by the time they realize what we've done, they're going to need our stuff, and that's what they did.

Gary Pageau: 37:34

And most of them ended up buying Kodak's IP at a discount.

Bill Jackson: 37:37

Well, I mean a lot of that IP. They bought that. You know well, some of them didn't buy it at a discount. Believe me, those numbers were huge. They couldn't go after Apple for all of the wireless IP because Apple had them over a barrel, over the user interaction design and this, the touchscreen area.

Craig McGowan: 37:56

Right.

Bill Jackson: 37:56

And so it became mutual assured destruction. But when Apple first introduced the iPhone in 2007, a lot of people didn't think it was going to be a success.

Gary Pageau: 38:05

Oh, exactly, I mean it was it was a very expensive phone.

Bill Jackson: 38:09

It was weird, there was, you know, Steve Ballmer said it had no keyboard on it, so it'll never be successful.

Gary Pageau: 38:15

Blackberries are the same thing.

Bill Jackson: 38:17

Yeah, you know. So the phone guys didn't take them seriously until they had to put a touchscreen on their phone, and then it was too late. Yeah, by the way, kodak would have never had the stones to do that.

Craig McGowan: 38:29

I worked on a product very late in my career which was a display, a picture, a digital display, something where you could send your pictures and share them as a dedicated photo sharing device. The problem with it was that there's this thing called the iPad which could do exactly the same thing and 20 other things as well. My cost structure was the same cost structure as the iPad. So which would you buy? Would you buy an iPad where you can do everything, including sharing pictures, or would you buy a dedicated photo sharing device for the same price from Kodak that could only share pictures?

Bill Jackson: 39:10

And yet my mother just picked up a digital photo frame where her grandkids can send pictures of their kids. I don't remember the skylight or something like that, oh yeah, I mean they're so sold at Best Buy.

Gary Pageau: 39:24

I mean, I see there's a good brand.

Bill Jackson: 39:26

It's still out there. I mean, we did the first long before.

Ben Gibson: 39:30

I've always said about digital. You know, if you give consumers choices, they'll choose it. So what happens is these things that were a dominant design basically from the beginning of time until the 90s, when digitization came out and there's 15 different ways to share images. Someone's going to use each one of those paths, so including the digital picture frame. The issue is not whether there are people out there who value it. The question is how many.

Bill Jackson: 39:56

Is there enough?

Ben Gibson: 39:57

Is there enough people to justify the cost? And, by the way, you know, like Craig, you mentioned the picture frame I ran into the same problem with Squeezebox at Logitech. So when I was there we had Squeezebox, which was basically an internet radio and you could run streaming music on it from all over the world, and basically that was just disrupted by a phone app on the iPhone, right From my heart radio and everybody else right and Sirius XM. I mean it was cool for about three years and then it just fell off the face of the earth quickly.

Gary Pageau: 40:30

So many times on a technology platform. I just want to spend a little bit of time. Not a lot of time, but you know, at the time I remember when PhotoCD came out and it was a huge deal. You know, Kodak spent a ton of money trying to get into the CE space by trying to sell these players that were made by Phillips. They licensed it and I think there were two things that happened there One, signal to the traditional industry that digital was coming, and two, it kind of made Kodak work with other people because they had to like license their standard and do these other things. Can anyone kind of address those two points? Is that an accurate assessment or am I just wrong?

Ben Gibson: 41:12

Yeah, no, I worked in that area when I came to Kodak right, so I was involved in CD writing. And you were right, we sourced the first CD writer from Phillips. There was this book that was referred to as the Rainbow Book because it had the various CD standards in there. There was a color for each one of them and I don't remember which one PhotoCD was.

Gary Pageau: 41:32

Red Book, I think actually.

Ben Gibson: 41:33

Yeah, red Book probably. Yeah, so, anyways, and they did, they had to partner with very good, no, they had to partner with Phillips. They had to partner with other parties in order to make that system work and they were actually able to do it. The problem was that it seemed like when you get into some of those other you know, orange and red and some of those other standards like there just wasn't enough, like you had to deliver the entire system. Right, everybody had a CD player that played music and they just bought that, probably paid $400 for it.

Ben Gibson: 42:05

Now you have this other one that you can hook to your TV and do games, and you could do games and PhotoCDs, but not really, and music, but you really can't do movies, right, right, because it's not enough data, right, you know, it's sort of like this use case in terms of delivering the image, which didn't work and computers kind of change that, because then we switched to PictureCD from PhotoCD around 2007. Then you just sort of that would play in any device, right? You know, the whole goal of PhotoCD was, if you take one role of film, you're not going to fill the CD. So you want to leave the session open so you can take the CD back and get more pictures put on it, if you want to which, of course, is you know the kind of like you know the advantage concept and that reuse and stuff like that.

Ben Gibson: 42:53

So there was a lot of just things that they didn't know about and the system that made it complicated to become a massively scaled system that they needed it to become.

Gary Pageau: 43:03

Yeah, I just remember back then like, for example, Apple put it inside the operating system of Mac OS back in that day, so it really kind of launched desktop publishing using photographic images and desktop public because it was really the cheapest way to get film images digital. It was crazy, yeah, it was really groundbreaking. So let's talk a little bit, if we can kind of about. Maybe, Mike, you've got some insight on this kind of on the hardware side. You know, there was Kodak Professional right when there were like, like you said, there was these Frankenstein monster cameras where they were Nikon and camera bodies with some Kodak sensors on it and really kind of created that thing. And then there was the consumer side. Was there a lot of interplay between them? And if there wasn't, should there have been?

Mike McDougall: 43:53

There's definitely some, and I think the rest of the group here can speak to it. I mean, even we brought product managers over from the Kodak professional team into consumer to work on some of the higher end DSCs. That was a learning for them, though. Right, you're building a 14N with a certain spec and a certain customer, and now high end for a consumer had a different bar right. But to that, even to that point, though you know, the quality was there, the lens tech was there, the imaging, in fact, we were really pushing on the higher end of that easy share range for a really good back.

Gary Pageau: 44:30

Oh, Schneider lenses were awesome.

Mike McDougall: 44:32

Oh yeah, where are they struggled? Where are teams struggled? Right, you get a lower end, right Entry level camera to say what's good enough, right to be a Kodak camera, and sometimes those specs were dictated by us. Again, talking about losing control, walking into a meeting with a major retailer saying, here's what you will build for me for the next Black Friday season. Right, with not a lot of opportunity to really shift that up Really, yeah, not the retailers I have to blame. That's what they knew, what they wanted. They knew what the customer wanted. It made just not have been what was best for us.

Craig McGowan: 45:06

I think the first customer for Kodak image sensors was probably the US government. I'm thinking right To his check on what Russia's doing and what people around the world are doing. So actually scaling that kind of system down to a digital camera and then scaling it out to a consumer camera. There's some challenges in that also.

Ben Gibson: 45:32

Yeah, and just to add to that point, I mean because I was going to say pretty much the same thing, right?

Ben Gibson: 45:37

So the high end cameras, which were professional camera, ended up being in the professional portfolio, started off as military or photojournalist type cameras and Kodak was making those cameras right In Rochester a lot of them right. And when you got into the consumer space, you know that was Chinon and that was you know you were working with Japanese partners and others and I thought that the teams since I worked with both teams I thought they did a fairly good job. I mean understanding. I mean I think the pro people knew, hey, I'm not going to be able to build this point and shoot camera. I mean, even though they tried the T cam to build a factory at Elm Grove, it never really made it. But the point is that you know, I think that the teams work together on image science and stuff like that pretty well, but they understood that you know you're not going to build a point and shoot digital camera in Rochester, but you could certainly do a Hassablad back or something like that, data back or something like that, right?

Bill Jackson: 46:36

Yeah, I'll echo that. I think there was a fair amount of sharing going on amongst the engineering teams on, you know, a lot of the stuff that goes on in the back of the background of what's in the camera.

Ben Gibson: 46:51

Right.

Bill Jackson: 46:52

What has to happen between when you push the button and all of the things that have to happen from an auto focus.

Gary Pageau: 46:58

Well, you do the rest. Once you press the button, you do the rest.

Bill Jackson: 47:01

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the thing is, you know, click to capture, click to click to click that kind of stuff. Those guys learned a lot from each other.

Mike McDougall: 47:09

Yeah.

Ben Gibson: 47:09

But from the standpoint of manufacturing one of those things that had to be done in a high volume manufacturing facility, and that was in Asia, so one thing Kodak did pretty well back in those days to drive that was, you know, we had an R&D cluster, so we had a capture cluster right, which would basically, you know, allocate funds to the different teams. And so there was R&D played a key role as a common point for the investment of the technology and did a pretty good job managing the technology. And so, as I said, I think I think Kodak built a lot of really good products right. The question is we didn't really know what to build right, but but you know, I think of like Tom Kelly and Jeff Peters and people like that working with R&D. They did an excellent job just really coordinating across the business units, especially in cameras.

Craig McGowan: 47:59

I have all my photos from those early cameras and I look at them and obviously the resolution wasn't what you get today, but the color was spot on and they, they, those were good pictures so, and better pictures than what some of the other guys made.

Gary Pageau: 48:18

Yeah, the other guys, yeah, well, that's very gratifying to hear that there was sort of the interchange, because obviously you know, you always hear the things in big companies, divisions, on talk and things like that. What about on the services side, right, when you have, you know, basically Kodak had three kinds of, in my opinion, three kinds of businesses. Right, you had the retail portfolio right, where you'd have mini labs and call it was actually filming paper. You guys were making equipment. Back then they need home printing, which later was the big gamble at the end that Antonio bet the end. But then there's also the online business and all of them kind of had, you know, a film component to it and it was so a consumerist business, but it was a very different customer set, very different relationships and things like that. So, from your viewpoint is anyone can chime in on that just on what that dynamic was like trying to manage? You know, you had different customer expectations, a different business models and different margins and you were trying to play. Kodak was trying to play in all of them.

Craig McGowan: 49:18

Yeah, where I was, I spent most. Some of you know Bill and and Ben spent time in in the retail area. I went out to Ofo oto in California once a month During the heydays of that business. Yeah, with the whole idea of building plumbing between our capture group and a photo at the time right, and that was a lot of fun. And what we tried to do working with in Bill's group was make our easy share software agnostic. You want to print, we're going to make it easy to print. You want to print a retail easy to print. You want to print at home easy to print. Want to print online easy to print? We're going to try and remove the friction from that. And that was moderately successful, I would say.

Bill Jackson: 50:06

I'll add something to that. That was probably when I was running the easier share group. That was the most difficult part of my job Because I was right. I pitched to the leadership of the company that the company should leverage all of the capture assets and all of the potential outputs right to be the center of your imaging experience and that's what easy share software was meant to be.

Bill Jackson: 50:36

But as a result of that, I had multiple masters, so I would show up at the picture CD team who want, you know, I'm trying to use their, I'm trying to convince them to use my software for their stuff and they have a certain set of requirements that is maybe in conflict with what the camera team wants and with what the Ophoto team wants and with what the, you know, the home printing team wanted, and that was probably the largest source of frustration in trying to manage a piece of software. Which, ultimately, what was it, craig? About 40 million installed users.

Craig McGowan: 51:14

Yep, that's about right.

Bill Jackson: 51:15

Somewhere around there. I mean, we did it Right. We had a really large installed base, but managing what came out in every version, that was the thing that the software team, the capture team wanted, the thing that the print team wanted, the thing that the OFoto team wanted, and you know, every one of every one of those output guys wanted the printing functions bias towards their solution. Right, the required.

Ben Gibson: 51:41

Yeah, the requirements were not customer requirements, they were channel requirements, right. And so, as you got into, from, picture vision was and Kodak picture network before that, right, so there's Kodak picture network and then picture vision was a scan film upload to the internet model and we knew that the retailers had to participate in that because that was the path for film developing was the retail channel right. And then, when, when OFoto came along and and you know, I remember having conversations about what you know, being involved in buying Ofoto or the or their competitor, which one we would end up buying, the big thing is that picture vision did not have digital camera upload acceptance capability, right, so the whole business case for for for Ofoto was about uploading digital cameras. It didn't have a retail component at all. It was a digital service.

Ben Gibson: 52:30

So now you had this conflict we talked about earlier, with the retailers, right, trying to drive the customer codec. We don't want you dealing directly with our customer, right, and they were. They were opting to buy a digital camera and then upload to Ofoto. And then, you know, Print@Kodak then the was was kind of a, you know an olive branch to say, okay, well, we'll create a service that if a customer wants to print a photo and pick it up at retail, they can do that. Right, they're still having that kind of a of a thing out there today. But you know this is, this is where companies get away from focusing on the customer to focusing on the channel. Right, and build me that point earlier right, when you're looking at the retailer as your customer, you're not making, you know, customer decisions that are going to help your business. You're making channel decisions that are going to help their business.

Bill Jackson: 53:18

Yeah, I'll give you an example that I didn't. I didn't know this until Willie used to take us on midnight tours of qualax labs.

Bill Jackson: 53:28

I remember those yeah we used to get on the plane in Rochester like five o'clock and land in Salt Lake City at midnight and Qualex lab while they were working. But when we were going through one of those Qualex labs, the manager that we were talking to said Kodak has no rights to the names and addresses on the outside of those, on those. None, we're not, we were not permitted to write them down, we were not permitted to copy them. Those were Walgreens, right, a CVS, whatever. That was their customer, dammit. And no one was going to go contact them. And you know, and we from the digital side are like how do we leverage this massive asset that Kodak has in film processing to get all the images in one place, right, so that you can look at your stuff and do something with whatever it might be, share print, you know whatever?

Ben Gibson: 54:24

Right, and those were always in conflict with each other right, everywhere we went and we actually replace those, those qualax drop boxes with Kodak picture maker kiosk. We had an initiative it was a huge investment where we basically said, everywhere there's a dropbox, we're going to put a picture maker kiosk. And we went into food, drug, everywhere, and we started. You know that was so the retailers could capture the film or, excuse me, the retailers could capture the digital prints. Right, because, because the retailers were having the same problem that bill just mentioned, only the opposite. They wanted, you know, that same at. We're trying to figure out how to leverage the customer, they're trying to figure out how to leverage us, right, so we put the picture makers in there. And then people were, were, then, you know, and you get the click of the print and all that kind of stuff, right. But but there was that. There was that those were evil days between Kegan and Willie and and and those conflicts, right. So epic stuff, right so so.

Gary Pageau: 55:24

so for those who aren't plugged in, could you share who Kegan and Willie were, just like who, what their names were and what their positions were in the organization?

Ben Gibson: 55:33

Well, I mean first of all, Bob Keegan was the president of consumer imaging right and he went on to run good year and Xerox and other companies right and really obviously is a hero to many, including myself. Shi was a cool guy and he and he, we all worked for Willie. And Willie is a professor at Harvard, at Harvard Business School.

Gary Pageau: 55:57

So, and he was, I think, because again, I ran into Willie when he was running DNA I believe I'm not sure which division I think was DNA I and he was really talking about some pretty interesting things like the ability to add features to a camera through a camera update right and adding functions, and you could add templates and things within the camera through a down which at the time you know was unheard of the fact you could update camera. Yeah, I probably was involved in that right.

Ben Gibson: 56:28

Here's a. Here's a trivia answer to a question: Willie Shih built the only billion dollar business at Kodak since 1991. There were no other businesses at Kodak that started after 1991 that crossed a billion dollars. At least Shih was the only one to do it.

Bill Jackson: 56:48

And you want to know another one about that. And I told him this when he was leaving to go off to the Display and Components Group. We were talking about whether or not the company invested enough in digital to be successful. And I said you know, you have to remember that DNAI has lost a billion dollars since you took it over.

Bill Jackson: 57:12

He's like, don't remind me of that. And I remember. I mean this is, this is a credit to George Fisher, right? We were in what were those things called the yearly strategic AOP or SNOP or whatever.

Bill Jackson: 57:25

They were called strategic quantification no no, no we had to go in and every business unit at Kodak had to go in the SQ, the SQ, yeah. So we had to go into once a year to show our strategy. And we walked in after we had just had this massive debacle with writing off a large pile of DC4300s, and Willie stood up in front of George and Harry, cavattis and Keegan and all those guys and said we lost $343 million last year and we're only going to lose $150 million next year and George Fisher, to his credit, said keep going, this is important.

Mike McDougall: 58:04

Right.

Bill Jackson: 58:06

But I mean, I sat there and I was just marveled by that number, right, those are weird numbers that you remember, but and there were other people that felt that was ridiculous, right, because the other thing that was happening, that also.

Ben Gibson: 58:18

There was also a board war going on, right. So you know, in I think it was 2003 or 2004, carl Icahn came, came a calling and said you guys shouldn't be investing in anything. Right, you guys are insane. And there was a. There was a division on the board, right, in terms of what should be invested in. So you know, people want to talk about. Imagine if you were the CEO and you have activist shareholders and a strategy. You have a strategy and you have activist shareholders that want to defeat your strategy and activist shareholders that want to support your strategy and you're trying to manage that on top of everything else. Right? That's why I mean I don't really buy and I've said this publicly, I don't buy the stupid manager narrative, right, like the managers didn't get it or there were stupid people or selfish people all kind of stuff, right?

Ben Gibson: 59:04

Because, because you know, the data just doesn't support that. I mean, the narrative is cool to talk about on Twitter or social media or wherever to you know, but it just doesn't hold. Doesn't hold to the facts, right.

Craig McGowan: 59:15

Everybody likes it, everybody likes it, everybody likes it.

Bill Jackson: 59:19

Sleep at the switch. Narrative right.

Gary Pageau: 59:21

Well, I mean, we've all seen those videos where it's some guy who does 10 minutes of research on the internet, then he posts a YouTube video. Kodak got wrong.

Mike McDougall: 59:30

Yeah he's posted the YouTube video with Kodak technology, by the way, on the back end.

Ben Gibson: 59:36

Yeah, that's part of the. That's part of the legacy, right?

Mike McDougall: 59:40

Yeah, yeah, there's, obviously there were mistakes, right. And with every conversation, I think for all of us, you hear a different story. You hear a different tale or anecdote to go. I didn't even know that right and then it starts to come together. But there was a lot that went right.

Bill Jackson: 59:55

The Ben's point, though, the degree of difficulty that the CEO would be either George or Dan or later even Antonio, the degree of difficulty trying to steer through that mess was extremely high. Right, and you know, I agree with Ben. I don't, I don't buy into the. They were asleep, they missed it. You know they screwed it up. You don't understand. Like I said earlier, there was, you know, there's a letter from one of your largest retailers that says you know, stop this or we're going to stop selling the little yellow boxes. You know, at the time the little little yellow boxes were a six ish billion dollar business with four billion cash, and so so, so so so Mike has touched on.

Gary Pageau: 1:00:43

I think the last point we want to get to, because I know we all we're all busy folks trying to rebuild our careers at the tail end of our lives here. So let's talk about the legacy of Eastman Kodak, right in terms of digital and this sort of thing, because I you know, for example, you know people are using Kodak technology or something Kodak invented every day. Oled is a Kodak technology. Most people don't know that. Can you guys share? Maybe we'll start with something that you think Kodak, either a technology or or a process or an insight.

Mike McDougall: 1:01:20

Well, I hear you did say over right OLED invented by a mistaken lab, or at least originated, yeah, but carried through right, put into product, saw the opportunity. I mean we saw the opportunity for displays back in gosh 0506, you know, we projected out you'd see the first really consumer driven OLED flat screens in 20, I think we said 2013. We were off maybe by a year. We're going to commercialization options, licensing options. You know we couldn't make it work, but that technology was there. And just brilliant, brilliant technology, and I think that lives on.

Craig McGowan: 1:01:59

Yeah, go ahead.

Ben Gibson: 1:02:01

And the other thing that we've done in the medical order here is you know, I think what Kodak did really well was they still do the things they've always done best Right. So when you look at the, the material science and the chemistry and the coding, they can still do all of that stuff. They've kept it. You know it would have been tempting to just shut things down several times like but, but they kept it. And now you know they have a foundation that they actually have grown revenue for the first time in you know, 20 years probably, well, probably 15 years.

Ben Gibson: 1:02:33

Right there, they've grown year over year revenue now in the last two years because now they've, they've, they've, they're back to that core piece and now they can do inks and they can do you know, battery components and they can do gelatin and they can do different thing. You know for pharmaceuticals and they can do different things. And and, and you know, I think when you look at some of the people who are now investing in the company, like Tom Gallisano, he's not, like you know, a fly by night kind of a guy who would make a stupid investment right.

Ben Gibson: 1:03:03

I think that now that they have that base sort of organized, I think they have a shot right, which is which is good. So they kept all the things they always did well for all those years and I think they can build on that.

Gary Pageau: 1:03:15

Bill, do you have anything jumping on that, on that time?

Bill Jackson: 1:03:18

There's. There's two pieces of the legacy, right. One is, you know what will they become, and I agree with Ben is that those are the things that they were always good at. And you know, I mean, I was running a startup in Silicon Valley for a while and we were doing roll to roll coding of stuff and we did it at Kodak Because those guys were really good at it, they had the right equipment and they could teach us, a small team, the things we needed to know to do what we needed to do.

Bill Jackson: 1:03:50

Now this company has since built their own facility and they're doing their own things. They're making roll to roll printed OLEDs Right. But the core of where that company got was learning how to code stuff from the people at Kodak, okay. And then there's also the legacy of what they leave behind in the digital imaging business, even if they're not necessarily in it, and that's everywhere. And we had this conversation with one of the phone targets One time when we were trying to license them and they said you know, you want, we wanted a percentage of the total price of the phone, which you know, $600, $700 phone turned out to be a big number and they said you know, you're charging us more for this technology than all the components we use for digital imaging.

Bill Jackson: 1:04:38

We said yeah so Right, Well, that you know that's. That's not right. And I said okay, fine, just like take it out of your phone and see if you can sell it. The technology that Kodak invented is everywhere from a standpoint of digital imaging, and it will be for a long time.

Gary Pageau: 1:05:02

Craig bring us home with that thought.

Craig McGowan: 1:05:03

Yeah Well, so Ben and Bill talked a lot about the technology. I think the thing that I observed was, back in the day, if your house was on fire, what would be the one thing you would go to get you'd go to? A picture to find that box.

Craig McGowan: 1:05:19

You go to try to find that box with your photos in it, and if you were to drop your phone in, you know in the water and you could never get it back again, what would the thing that you missed the most would? It would be the photos on it. And that lives on right. And Kodak understood that. We, we all understood that implicitly that photographs are a precious thing. And the fact that it went digital, nothing's changed there.

Gary Pageau: 1:05:46

Hey, gentlemen, listen, thank you so much for your time and for your expertise. I think it's been a great conversation and, again, just appreciate what you've been able to share and appreciate the positivity, because I think it is, in the end, a positive story. It's a story of you know, company transition, market transition, consumer behavior transition, and how we manage transitions is sometimes painful, sometimes unpleasant, but in the end it's where growth happens. So, folks, thank you, craig Ben. Bill and look forward to maybe seeing you in real life that somewhere in Rochester sometime soon.

Craig McGowan: 1:06:23

And thanks for getting us all together. It's nice to see these guys again.

Bill Jackson: 1:06:29

Thank you, bye, bye.