Arkady Renko

Wait, there's a football team in Arizona?

My thoughts and prayers as you go through this, Campy.

At least we have had more of a fan-favorite as GM during most of these years....

And to add, I agree with you about the large brand value that Kodak had and still has to a large extent. Due to this and due to some intelligent people they have working at different levels of the company, I feel that their future is not doomed if they are smart and plan for the future. I was not trying to say that they do not have a huge room to improve in the digital market, but only that their current level of success in it indicates that all is not lost for them.

All right, well I suppose my position was unclear from the outset and for that I apologize. My main bone of contention is that Kodak is at some level making the same mistakes now as they did in retrospect in not looking ahead and not improving its ability to innovate as much as they should. I was defending past actions not to say that Kodak has been acting intelligently at all times, but to point out that conventional wisdom on the right move was not as settled as it is now. I was doing that to say that while manufacturing losses now may have been a painful necessity, other cuts that Kodak is doing may be a mistake and that this fact may not be revealed right away just as Kodak's assumption about the film industry was not clearly revealed to all right away. If it has seemed like I think this is not largely management's fault outside of the inevitable cuts in the film sector, then I apologize for not being clear. I also was maybe incorrectly seeing people say that large companies are doomed to failure. I believe otherwise and it looks like you feel that Kodak could be more successful than it is right now despite its size. My criticism for Kodak mainly comes from what I hear from people in R&D, a place where they have cut a lot of people recently. Not only did they hurt morale by decimating their unit, they mainly focused on cutting people who were not doing things that were coming to market immediately. I feel that pressure from Wall Street is making Kodak too focused on immediate cost savings and immediate payoffs from R&D to their future detriment. Just like it was easier to live off the fat film profits 10 to 5 years ago rather than planning and sacrificing for the future, the easy thing and the wrong thing to do in R&D is to focus on short term gains in reducing payroll and reducing long-term research. To others who are upset for these families and for the economy in WNY, I am not happy about the manufacturing cuts however necessary they might be.

Todd: You say at times that this is all Kodak's fault for not thinking ahead. But then you say that the job cuts would have been necessary anyway? Those two positions do not reconcile themselves to each other but it has been helpful to your posting by being able to swing back and forth to be in the right. I never said that they should be maintaining the current staffing levels in manufacturing and to suggest otherwise is pretty effing stupid. You can make straw men all you want, but doing so is not a substitute for being right. Sound n Fury: The current layoffs focus on manufacturing. When I have been referring to layoffs, I have been referring to the layoffs that have been going on for a long period of time. Recent past job cuts have focused on R&D and at removing spending on longer range R&D efforts. Longer term research does little to help out the bottom line now, but reducing it risks success in the future.

Must be due to that WNY economic resurgence we have been hearing so much about.

Tell that to the people being laid off? I have been questioning the layoffs this entire time and you have been supporting them. People have been assuming the management must be right this time while blaming them for being wrong in the past. I question the layoffs because they have been cutting R&D jobs which is where they have the possibility to "invent" the future as you say. The fact of the matter is that Kodak has had success in digital photography (you keep on ignoring the fact that they have the largest market share in the United States) but no matter how good Kodak is, the fat profits of the film industry won't be there.

The Seanold is wise! Seriously, why would we expect the national media to pick the Bills over the Super Bowl champion and a team that was a field goal away from the AFC championship? Especially with a new QB! We may know better, but let's wait until the Bills win some games before we get so upset over the national media not picking them better than third in the East.

I think that people are having a little too much hindsight bias when it comes to the transition to digital. It was not unusual for Kodak to think that the film business would last a little bit longer than it looks like it will. Many others at the beginning thought so as well. Kodak has actually done surprisingly well in the digital field coming back from behind as they did to now lead the largest market in the world. However, no matter how good Kodak does in digital, they will never have the profits they did in film. No amount of CEO decision-making could have changed that; the industry is just different. Film just has larger profit margins. It may be fashionable to talk about how much more dynamic and innovative small companies are, but this is overstated. Both sizes have their place in the economy. Large ones help improve efficiency due to their scale and most importantly large companies are the only ones that can afford largescale R&D efforts. Your start-ups just exploit a new idea and run with it whether that idea was original to the founders, a university or somewhere else. This is important, but acting like large companies do not play a role in innovation is idiotic. Who makes all the innovations in airplane engines and power plants, oh wait, GE... Finally, where are the start-ups when it comes to digital photography? The other dominant players besides Kodak either were already in the camera industry or were a large, established player in electronics generally. There is pressure to cut huge swath of jobs, sell off patents that can pay off down the line and other things that raise the bottom line in the coming quarters. Sometimes this is a smart move and sometimes it is not. Often, management overreacts during difficult quarters and cuts people in order to get Wall Street off their backs. Perhaps all of these cuts are necessary for a business stand-point, but perhaps they are not. Isn't it rather unwise to assume that CEOs can mess up planning for future market changes but cannot mess up deciding whether or not to layoff employees?

Is it weird that now I actually might care more about hockey than I normally do?

The Jets do have fruity flag carriers who run across the end zone after a Jets score.

He spells his first name wrong.

I hear he also tips 25% on average.

I am disappointed that you did not touch upon TEs.

I hear Willis McGahee is finishing up his doctorate in Chemical Engineering.

Is problems?

They're still around? I thought Eazy E died.

He saved the life of a four year boy.

What happened to BiB?

Mad Buffalo Disease is a chick?

You are complaining about camera phones? Seriously, it was not unusual to think that they wouldn't catch on as many thought that the poor picture quality and the cost of getting them off the phone wouldn't be worth it. To be honest, I am not sure they have caught on as much as people think. The wireless companies have put them on almost all the phones they sell now because of the incentive to encourage people to use their services. People buy them often because this is the phone they give you when they sign up. As far as R&D goes, the solution to not having good enough products as you say they lack is not to cut back on R&D. Focus? Google has had little focus in its research. It simply encourages smart people to innovate and it it's reaping rewards. If anything, focus is a bad thing as any stuffed-suit often has little idea about the proper focus in research. If it's about the best products winning, why has Kodak had many quarters where it has the largest market share in cameras lately? You say it's strickly capitalism, and free markets are often the most efficient way to do things, but that doesn't mean that cutting many of these jobs is the right thing for Kodak to do.

That's really realistic.. that there would be that large a different in vision.. Please.

It's all about pumping up the stock price and freaking out over momentary dips in revenue. They have been cutting R&D jobs so this is not just about the transition away from regular film.

Well I will try not to be dying near you.