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Polaroid - imagining a different scenario or different scenarios for Polaroid
By theszak on Sat, 02/09/2008 - 6:24am
a.
If the early entrepreneurial spirit of Edwin Land were around, what other direction or directions might Polaroid in Cambridge have taken?... than the story at
http://news.google.com/news?q=polaroid
b.
Taking into account digital technology could there have been any way at all to have morphed the business of instant film chemistry and the Polaroid cameras so that for example all the people of Polaroid had been retained in developing new directions for a Cambridge company?
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Comments
Almost
This would almost be a decent post, if only "The Zak" had just stated why it is relevant: Polaroid has announced it will cease producing its signature instant film. Et voila, an informative post.
More than One Step
I was working for Harvard on a health study of Polaroid workers in the late 90s. It was like being a fly on the wall, and confidant all at the same time to wander the halls changing out air filters and downloading monitors.
Sad what happened to the company. The fatal mistake was tapping an appliance and tool manufacturing executive for CEO who didn't understand the high-technology, do or die reality of the company in the rapidly changing digital photography market. They guy wasn't interested in moving forward or even moving with the stream, he just wanted to hold the tiller like he was selling toasters or drills or other traditional items where styles change but internals don't.
They came out with good products, but they sat for lack of marketing and interest or out of internal politics. They came out with some amazing photo printers, but too much too late. The short history of their decline: few people will buy instant prints when they can take digital photos. They somehow failed to get that.
I felt for these people as I had worked at Arthur D. Little in the early 90s when the business hotshots took over and iced the century old technology development business that they didn't understand. When the business consultancy tanked, the company died with it.
Ditto
My father worked for Polaroid from the 1960s to just a few years ago, starting as a staff photographer for Dr. Land and ending up in management. He pretty much said the same as you as it was going on. According to him, DiCamillo had no idea what he was doing and ran the company into the ground until it went under about a few years ago (Today's Polaroid is not the company that Land founded in 1937, I believe it was dissolved and reincorporated after a bankruptcy). Innovative products were often ignored or poorly marketed at the expense of slapping the brand name on products that weren't manufactured or even had much to do with what Polaroid did. It was a real shame, because it was a unique company. Most people were on a first name basis with Mac Booth, the CEO throughout much of its existence, it was much smaller than its name (I doubt it ever employed more that 20,000 people worldwide), which created a community among its employee which in turn gave it a very high morale rating among its employees (enough so that they were instrumental in blocking a hostile takeover bid in the late 80s). Instant photography by far wasn't the only product Polaroid was involved in, it was what it was best known for though. It had non instant lines for professional use (Polaroid Professional Chrome was among the highest quality chrome ever produced), imaging products (Polarized sunglasses anyone?) and some defense products as well. It was such an innovative place which really didn't have take the path it did. I'm sure Ed Land's been rolling in his grave for years now.
Polaroid was very unusual in
Polaroid was very unusual in that it was a technology company that depended on a single high volume consumer product. It didn't even have a "generic" association with photography (or a film development business, obviously) like Kodak. This, I think, posed a very tough management challenge, and even in hindsight it's not at all obvious waht could have been done. The company made efforts to diversify (ID systems, battery technology) that didn't work.
Let me put it another way: How would you save Gillette if someone introduced a digital razor?
Polaroid was very unusual in
Polaroid was very unusual in that it was a technology company that depended on a single high volume consumer product. It didn't even have a "generic" association with photography (or a film development business, obviously) like Kodak.
Not true. Instant photography was only one of its product lines. It had other product lines in government (Defense and NASA among others), law enforcement, professional photography (and it did produce non-instant film) and other imaging applications (IE filters etc).
Bonus fun fact
The signature Polaroid building on Memorial Drive wasn't built for them. It was originally built for B.B. Chemicals (my father-in-law worked there back in the day).
Another Polaroid fun fact
Polaroid does a great thing by teaming up with job-training programs (mostly those based at public and private schools) to provide positions for people ages 18-22 with disabilities. These folks mostly learn clerical, assembly, and janitorial jobs, and they're treated wonderfully by the staff, who regard them as coworkers on equal footing.
They used to hire a lot of these folks when they turned 22 (the age at which one is no longer eligible for publicly funded special ed). Except that when No Child Left Behind passed, Polaroid ended up entering into some agreement with the government that they'd only hire people with a high-school diploma. This has something to do with Polaroid having government contracts -- maybe someone else has more details than I do about this agreement.
Sounds great on the surface, and sounds like something that would encourage kids to stay in school and get an education, right? If they hear that more and more major corporations are insisting on diplomas?
Yeah, great, but now go back to the young adults with developmental and/or psychiatric disabilities who used to get hired by Polaroid. The new policy even applies to folks who are not capable of getting a high school diploma, even if they showed during their internship that they're able to competently carry out a specific skill at Polaroid. There's a loophole in the ADA where it's not discriminatory for an employer to require something such as a diploma, even though having a diploma wouldn't actually be an essential skill needed in order to correctly mop floors.