Incredibly well researched and annotated. A tidbit that struck me was that not only did Kodak produce the first digital camera in 1975¹, they had a product in the form of a digital spy satellite in 1976.

1: https://petapixel.com/2010/08/05/the-worlds-first-digital-ca...

Kodak's failure to respond to the threat of digital photography has always been a classic example of an innovators dilemma fail... but after reading this I realize it was far worse than I thought.

Having been given 30-40 years of financial data on the effect of digital photography squeezing them out of one lucrative sector they wasted all that unique foreknowledge on ignoring digital photography in the consumer space as well.

When I was a kid my parents had one of the Kodak instant cameras. I remember when Polaroid sued them out of existence and as part of a class action lawsuit my parents got a settlement. It was some coupons for Kodak brand batteries and one specific model of film camera we could never find in stock before it expired. https://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/17/business/kodak-to-compens...

That's when I learned class action lawsuits only benefit the lawyers.

Why would Land have been such a fierce advocate against the government contracts benefiting Kodak? Was he just trying to get some sort of overall business edge on Kodak even though Polaroid had no real skin in the game WRT the govt contracts? He had to know that Kodak would retaliate in some manner yes? I suppose he severely underestimated the potential backlash to his actions?

Super interesting that even a heavily consumer facing company like Kodak could employ thousands of people on large scale government projects. It definitely speaks to the scale of some of these projects.

$4.4 billion per Keyhole satellite. Comparable to an aircraft carrier. I wonder how they spent that much.

The OG East Coast vs (Mid)West Coast battle.

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