Finished.

Kodak will file for bankruptcy protection soon, the only way in which it can sell its last remaining asset, the patent portfolio, without attracting fraudulent conveyance suits from creditors.

When they ran this moronic and arrogant full page ad in the WSJ in June, 2009, it was already all over:

The risible statement that their business is about humanity tells you all you need to know.

And while journalists are proclaiming the cause of Kodak’s death as a failure to see digital coming, nothing could be further from the truth.

The digital sensor may have been invented by Bell Labs in the 1960s but it took Kodak to place it in a working camera in 1975. By 1991 that camera was a commercial product, with a slightly smaller than MFT sensor lodged inside a Nikon SLR (and later Canon SLR) and selling for over $25,000. Yes, Nikon and Canon were using Kodak’s sensors twenty years ago! Kodak got the manufacturing process fixed and prices down, while quality went up over the next decade, and today you will still find Kodak sensors inside many costly cameras – from medium format professional DSLRs to collectible jewelry like the Leica M9. So it’s not like Kodak was anything but a leader here. Where they lost the plot was in not going mainstream and doing a lousy job of protecting their many patents, the same patents which are all that is left of value in Rochester. Only a naïve inventor thinks that he need not sue to protect his intellectual property. You think Apple is bringing daily patent suits against the those ‘designers’ who are legally challenged at Samsung, HTC and Google for fun?

So critics of Hewlett Packard can take solace in the knowledge that while HP’s management has been stuck on dumb for a decade now (and will likely have to break up the company and sell off the pieces soon), Kodak beat them to the punch years earlier. Kodak’s demise is not the result of their missing technological change. It’s the result of a failure of execution, meaning lousy management, blind to the marketplace and hampered by a great legacy. The boards of both companies have been committing grand larceny every pay day for years and the shareholders have no one to blame but themselves.