Kodak's biggest competitor worked in Kodak's own lab

Kodak's biggest competitor worked in Kodak's own lab.

Written on 12 August 2026, based on public reports at that time.

In December 1975, a 24-year-old Kodak engineer walked into a meeting carrying an eight-pound device he had built. It captured photographs without film and stored them on a cassette. The first digital camera, invented inside the world’s largest film company.

Management’s response, in his own later telling, was that it was cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.

Kodak’s own research soon predicted digital would replace film within twenty years. The company decided that meant there was time. When the same engineer built a market-ready digital camera in 1989, marketing declined to sell it, protecting film. Through those decades, the board’s competitor analysis tracked Fuji’s market share. The competitor that mattered was never on the slide. He was on the payroll. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Twenty-five years after that first meeting, the same scene played out in another boardroom. Two founders offered their DVD-by-mail startup to Blockbuster for 50 million dollars. The CEO called it a niche business. By the founders’ account, they were laughed out of the room. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores then. It has one now. The startup was Netflix.

Neither board lacked competitor analysis. They did it diligently, every quarter, tracking the named rivals they had always fought. The threat that ended them never qualified for the slide, because it did not look like a competitor. It looked like a gadget. A niche. Something cute.

That vocabulary is the tell. When a board dismisses something with words like cute, niche, or toy, instead of numbers, that is not analysis. That is comfort.

So change the question your competitor slide answers. Not how are we doing against the usual five. Ask instead, if someone funded a startup to make this company unnecessary, what would it build, and who is already building it.

The rivals on your slide are yesterday’s war. Your replacement rarely announces itself as one.