Polariod is also another NEW company that bought the name after the original company went out of business.

Technicolor is still Technicolor. No-one has bought their name. Do you know about their satelitte distribution of movies?? http://www.technicolor.com/uploads/associated_materials/technicolor_satellite_distribution_system.pdf

There are superb designers to be had in most companies but it’s the ‘management’ who decides which way to proceed and which model to produce is a bad call, well, that’s what you have.
Steve Jobs was the management at Apple.
He knew what product to develop and market. He had full control over what was to be approved.

Kodak, Pola.. and the rest of them including Microsoft can’t come up with a decent hardware because they have idiots decide which one to market. MS has great designers and tons of money but they don’t let them do what’s needed.
Ya think Steve Balmer has something to do with that?
Heheh.

Come to think of it, a lot of companies are like that. They had the capability, money to do the first iPhone and I-whatever and no one had the guts but Steve Jobs. Am not defending Apple (don’t own i-anything) but seeing it as is and Jobs was good at it.

Remember Bell and Howell (sic?)
They sold their name and branding really crappy stuff and totally embarrassed to even see it, let alone buy anything under that name. Same is happening with Polaroid. They sold their name.

Kodak would do better to sell everything and make film only. That would be a very tiny business but it would be suitable for better profit margin. Or… just sell the name because these brands are really dead. Current generation has no clue who are these companies.
Just sayin’

Your quote: “Can staying power predict future lifespan? The answer is a terrifying “maybe,” and in the cases where the answer is “yes,” it’s usually because of adaptation in conjunction with the weight a brand may have to throw around. This can occur even (or especially) on the crutches of adversity — IBM is a powerful example in consumer tech. These are some of the approaches Polaroid, Technicolor, and Kodak are taking to stay relevant.”

Staying power implies success. Are you saying that success predicts future lifespan? If so, why ask the question? If you meant would brand recognition predict future lifespan, the answer would be no. Brand predicts nothing. It only represents a company and/or product.

Adaption refers to; a 2002 movie, biology, disambiguation, film scripts and a few others. To replace and use the word “adapting” also is a miss as this relates technology that is in step with current trends. None of your example companies can survive without one thing – INNOVATION. IBM once was an example of consumer tech. Now it’s an example of services with Lenovo owning their once popular consumer space. Better example would be Oracle, Google and dare I say it, Apple.

Polaroid and Kodak are no longer relevant and will never come back. In the mid 1980′s Kodak took over a small company called Spin Physics that pioneered hyper-fast video capture for scientific use. This could have turned into Kodak owning much of the market share in today’s prosumer world. Kodak in from 1982 through the 1990′s lost a great deal of market share to Fuji and Ilford for not being as innovative in paper and film. Consider the days of the horse drawn carriage at the dawn of automobiles becoming affordable. Anyone that was in the buggy whip business would have to innovate when the market clearly was moving toward auto parts. Technicolor on the other hand was and still is about technical services. Short term they exist, long term they will exist by being innovative in creating software that that compliments video production.

Choosing the right words and phrases will get your point across. I can see where you wanted to go with this, but it would need more thought and context.

Technicolor, for all it’s worth and innovations in our cinematic history, failed to adapt. As huge and innovative as they are why didn’t they come up with the industry standard for “The Proffessional Codec”? I mean the sudden drop for those using film stock over digital wasn’t overnight. Someone gets a licensing right to H.264 or ProRes, think of the royalty checks to the engineers. It’s great that they got with Canon and made a cute little profile for their cameras. But honestly for the money and the way things are with technology, I have better options than Canon, for me. I sold my 5DMK2 six months after the GH2 came out. It cost me less to operate, and my clients couldn’t really tell the difference in my work at first. But as soon as the hacks started to stabilize I picked a few I liked and they noticed the differences right away. But I digress, it was an example of a business decision as a filmmaker that shows we should always go for whats best, for us. Technicolor failed to adapt by creating an industry accepting recording/playback codec suitable for our needs, like ProRes, .R3D, DNxHD, etc.

Kodak, kinda falls into a different category, but sorta hurts the most because they’ve been around since the early days. Their history in cinema and photography is huge. But, they also failed to adapt. The list for them would be very long.

I’d like to think because of their failures to adapt we’ve received so many technological innovations in our craft. Filmmaking is quite honestly one of the most difficult yet rewarding careers. The end result for me is what always keeps me going. Knowing that I don’t have to “pay to play” with the big boys anymore is nuts. Today just about anyone can make a film and express themselves to world and find an audience. As an artist this is huge for me. I started off as a filmmaker using film, and I loved it for what it was. But like girlfriends past, I’ve moved on.

I hope these brands can survive, but if not at least their history will always be around.

But if these companies can figure out where to go from here then great.

Kodak, I think will probably be okay in the long run, but I’m not an economist. If they put out a picture style, they could effectively capture some of their core film-stock market. Or, if they put together a looks package like Magic Bullet Looks.

Technicolor, to me, doesn’t sound as innovative as they make their projections sound, but again, that’s based on this article alone. It remains to be seen what they can pull off. A streaming service? Meh…

http://www.engadget.com/2013/01/08/polaroids-interchangeable-lens-cameras-hands-on-video/

I won’t miss you, big K. You’ve buried yourself by your own bare hands.