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When Steve Sasson presented the first digital camera to executives at Kodak, it took twenty-three seconds to record a fuzzy black and white image onto a cassette tape and display it on a television screen. Executives at Kodak were not impressed. Yet even when their research proved the viability of digital photography, they still didn’t embrace it – not because they didn’t see its potential, but for fear of cannibalizing their film business. Of course we all know they were right – digital cameras did, in fact, irreversibly disrupt film.
Now, Sasson’s digital camera prototype sits on display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and Kodak is aiming for what could be an epic comeback story from its 2012 bankruptcy.
In “Developing Disruption,” the second episode of the Trailblazers podcast, host Walter Isaacson, former CNN chairman, explores how quickly the disruptors can become the disrupted. The tale begins – and continues – with the textbook case of Kodak, but to be fair, many collisions with the digital world shaped the photography industry as we know it today. Just think of your go-to method of capturing memories – digital camera or mobile phone? Isaacson unwinds the disruptive history of the photography industry, developing the stories of opportunities – those missed and those captured – along the way.
