I saw an article in The New York Times that just struck me as wrong. It was about Kodak.
“Eastman Kodak, the inventor of the hand-held camera, plans to stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames in the first half of 2012 in an effort to cut costs.”
There is a lot more to this than simply “cutting costs.” It means abandoning a product line, throwing people from employment into the unemployment line, blackening your own eye, admitting to the world that you don’t know how to manage a product line/manufacturing line.
Sometimes you exit product lines because the market moved and you didn’t. Sometimes because you weren’t competitive. And maybe that was because you just didn’t have the will or the expertise to do the job right.
I’m not going to write a Harvard Business School case study on the situation. But I think it should make all of us pause and ask if we have what it takes to make our product a success–from marketing to manufacturing. Do we have the will to succeed? The discipline to do it right?
This is sad. but, welcome to the NWO.
Where it is impossible to purchase anything made with quality, or built to last, and everything is considered a consumable.
Thanks to NAFTA and those who purchase everything they own based only on the lowest price.
This is just one more company that failed because they couldn't lower their wages and standards enough to beat the lowest price competitor's consumables.
Just my 2 cents worth..