Kodak Is Struggling...Is It Really Surprising?

The BBC website has a short article with the headline "Kodak to cut an extra 3,000 jobs". The article notes, "Struggling US camera company Eastman Kodak is to cut at least 3,000 extra jobs this year as it continues efforts to fully adapt to the digital age."

Since they made all their profits on film, Kodak was slow to warm up to the digital camera age. Instead of jumping ahead of the pack, they spent more resources on advancing the quality of film (and, in my opinion, proceeded to stick their head in the sand).

Still, once a giant like Kodak decided to get into the digital camera business, you'd expect that their brand alone would sell cameras...and it does (although not as well as Canon or Nikon).

Given the quality of Kodak cameras, is it really surprising to anyone that Kodak has the lowest workforce they've had since the 1930's? I've listed a couple Kodak cameras that we've aggregated reviews for on ProductCritic:

• Kodak EasyShare C743 - ProductCritic Score = 63
• Kodak EasyShare Z650 - ProductCritic Score = 73

These two cameras currently hold the distinction of being the worst and third worst rated products on ProductCritic.

While Kodak has targeted 2008 to be the year that they are back in the game, although they've recently had their first quarterly profit in two years, my take is that the lead that the other companies have in the digital camera market may be too much to overcome.