The Story Of

Polaroid

Prepaired By : Muhittin Tarhan Deniz Tura Istanbul, 2013

OBSCURA

By Johannes Vermeer, 1665 Girl with a Pearl Camera like pictures 150 years before invention of camera

 Invention of the photograph The first photograph, 1826 By French Scientist, Joseph Nicephore Niepce

George Eastman In 1900 Kodak Brownie $1,00

Blinded by the lights

LAND-WHEELWRIGHT LABORATORIES

With his Harvard physics instructor, George Wheelwright III, Land left school for the second time to found the Land-Wheelwright Laboratories in 1932. The name of the company turned to POLAROID COPRATION in 1937.

Kodak gave an order of $10K worth of polirizing filter.

When the outside view is too bright.

A turn of the control knob of the Polaroid Sight-Conditioning window brings brilliance down to the comfort level

Or if you tire of the view another cuts it off altogether

Jennifer Land :" Daddy, Why cant I see the picture now."
Year 1943, on vacation

Test photo of Land, March 13, 1944 taken just a few months after Jennifer asked her question

The first instant camera

The Model 95 went on sale in November 1948, and outsold even Lands optimistic projections.

1950s, 60s and 70s

1948

1949
1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967

Annual Sales Growth, 23% Annual profit Growth, 17%

1968
1969 1970 1971 1972

In 1972, SX-70 was launched

In 1974, a billion photo was taken The company reached a billion dollars in annual sales

Andy Warhol, 1980 20 x 24 inch camera Ultimately 5 pcs One is still active in NY Only in 90 sec

But what is the driving force?

1 The genius&visionary founder, a man who both served as the companys public face and drove its creativity 2 Being stick to the core competence which is intersecting art & science & technology with passion

What was the business Model?

Polaroid made their money by selling cheap cameras and then charge a lot of money for the Polaroid film. Since film is used continuously this turned out to be a fantastic business model with fantastic profits.

Is the business model, familiar?

Just like Gilette makes great money by selling razor blades, Polaroid made great money by selling film. The main source of profit is not the razor or the camera, its the continuous consumption of blades and film.

POLAVISION CAMERA - 1977 Some say spent 2 billion $ for development 10 years to have it in the store First Time - His infallibility is questioned
He liked winning, and when in the end he didnt win all the time, it became very difficult for him, said one of his collegues

Bill McCune took over as CEO after Land in 1975. Land got retired in 1982

"Land was a troublemaker. He dropped out of

Harvard and founded Polaroid. Not only was he one of the great inventors of our time but, more important, he saw the intersection of art and science and business and built an organisation to reflect that. His coaxing is one of the dumbest decisions Ive ever heard of

"

Patent Infringement

Polarois sued KODAK for the infregement of patent

Lawsuit lasted nearly 15 years

KODAK to be payed $925 billion.

Being firmly committed to technology, McCune decided that Polaroid should move into digital imaging in the early 1980s.

In 1986 Polaroid invested 30 million USD in a new unit called The Microelectronics Laboratory.

In 1989, more than 40 percent of Polaroids R&D budget was spent on exploring various digital imaging technologies!

The technological results were promising: in 1980 only 6 percent of the firms patents were related to electronics. In 1990, the same figure had grown to 28 percent.

Being a technology driven company, Polaroid always regarded the shift to digital imaging as a technological challenge, not as a market challenge. It was assumed that once the technology is ready, it will become profitable, somehow.

Digital Challenge

Disruptive shift from analog to digital...

Failed to adapt to changing technology trends

Polajet Polaroid Inkjet Printer

In mid 80s Polaroid buys a local company called ACT which was developing largefotmat inkjet printers.

The intenjion was to for a desktop printer and a project rolled out.

So Why didnt Polaroid become a printer company? - Photographic quality ; A technology didnt just have to work it had to be beautiful.

 Polaroid leaders believed that customers would always want a hard-copy print "It's amazing, but kids today don't want hard copy anymore," said DiCamillo.

Even though it performed thorough market research, Polaroid was unable to foresee that the photo album would be replaced by the digital slide show Polaroid researchers resisted the whole idea of making money on hardware
The sheer profitability of film sales created another obstacle to thinking about new business models

In the 1990s Polaroid became increasingly market oriented. The new CEO Gary DiCamillo who joined in 1996 had a background in consumer marketing and cut down even more on technology.

This meant more money to marketing, and less money to R&D in 1996-2000.

The Barbie camera from 1998 is one example of how Polaroid combined old technology with new marketing and made great money, in the short term

Today there is a movement called Save Polaroid, which tries to persuade film manufacturers to keep making the Polaroid film

Zink Zero Ink Project

Instant did not die yet. In year 2008 together with the ZINK, Polaroid PoGo printers are launched

The Stocks of Polaroid was $ 60 in 1997 and in 2001 frozen by NYSE The stock has lost 99.5% only in 4 years

The firm went from huge profits to collapsing revenues within only a few years

In late 2001 Polaroid was declared bankrupt and the remaining parts of the firm were sold.

How could this happen? Did they recognize the threat from digital technology? How did Polaroid react?

Its amazing to see that Polaroid was better prepared for this technological revolution in the 1980s than in 2000.

Disruptive innovation :Coming up with entire new technology and processes to achieve profits Disruptive innovation is mainly a business model challenge.

Changing the business model is far more difficult;

Re-educating the sales organization Lower profits Cannibalization Conflicts

Huge organizational changes

So the main lesson from the sad story about Polaroids bankruptcy: Disruptive innovation is not primarily a technological challenge, it is a business model challenge.

 They are shared as objects rather than as streams.. The slight delay while waiting the develop of the picture allows people to have couple of exchanged words. INSTANT is a business story, about what At the end of the develop you give the object a GIFT. happens when a company loses its as innovative They were spark. idea factory It is a fine-arts story, showcasing the amazing things people did with Polaroid film. It is a technology story, of a company that created and maintained a niche all its own for 60 years. And it is a pop-culture history, of a friendly product that millions of people absolutely adored. I like to think that it also tells a larger story, about the rise and fall of American invention and manufacturing.

Polaroid rolled out the next-generation printer, whereupon youd run out and upgrade because it was just so cool. Itd probably be wireless, too. Polaroid during these years not only grasped thisit was actively pursuing it. Engineers were hard at work on non-impact-printing technologies like inkjet and thermal transfer. Eventually Polaroid bought a local company called Advanced Color Technologies, which was developing large-format inkjet printers, and had a pile of patents on inkjetprinting heads. Why didnt Polaroid become a printer company? That old bugbear known as photographic quality. A technology didnt just have to work; it had to be beautiful. At the time, inkjet printers produced coarse, muddy images, and few people at Polaroid believed that photographers would ever be happy with anything out of those machines. As one employee put it, The engineering department refused to accept the bad taste of the consumer.

Similarities

Both were founded by college university dropouts (Harvard and Reed) Both companies were established very close to the great research universities to attaract the talent

Both CEO were the public figure & face of their companies

Both CEO insisted that their investions would change the fundamental nature

The worldview Jobs was describing perfectly echoed Lands: Market research is what you do when your product isnt any good. And his sense of innovation: Every significant invention, Land once said, must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention. Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, None. It isnt the consumers job to know what they want.

Both CEOs are on top in personal patent league. Land has 535 patents, Jobs has 313

Both became technology giant of their age and profitted multibillion dollars

The biggest competitors were from far-east

Both sued their suppliers for copying their products and won the lawsuits.

Save the Apple

Thanks

disruptive shift from analog to digital...

competitive advantage...