Blue Ocean Strategy Articles : Gone in an instant—failing to stay in the blue
“The reality is that industries never stand still. They continuously evolve. Operations improve, markets expand, and players come and go. History teaches us that we have a hugely underestimated capacity to create new industries and re-create existing ones.” --From the book Blue Ocean Strategy, page 6, co-authored by Professor W. Chan Kim & Professor Renée Mauborgne.
A recent announcement by Polaroid that it will discontinue instant film, the very technology it pioneered sixty years ago, came as a reminder of the Blue Ocean Strategy mantra that companies and industries rise and fall—and there are none which are permanently great.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
Polaroid is closing factories in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands and cutting 450 jobs as the brand synonymous with instant images focuses on ventures such as a portable printer for images from cell phones and Polaroid-branded digital cameras, televisions and DVD players.
This year's closures will leave Polaroid with 150 employees at its Concord headquarters and a site in the nearby Boston suburb of Waltham, down from peak global employment of nearly 21,000 in 1978.
Polaroid failed to embrace the digital technology that has transformed photography, instead sticking to its belief that many photographers who didn't want to wait to get pictures developed would hold onto their old Polaroid cameras.
Global sales of traditional camera film have been dropping about 25 percent to 30 percent per year, ''and I've got to believe instant film has been falling as fast if not faster,'' said Ed Lee, a digital photography analyst.
''At some point in time, it had to reach the point where it was going to be uneconomical to keep producing instant film,'' Lee said.
Perhaps Polaroid can take some comfort in the fact that it is not alone—just take Kodak for example. In 2004 Kodak was de-listed from the Dow Jones essentially because it failed to realize that its core business of film imagery was becoming extinct in face of digital imagery. While Kodak is doing its best to reinvent itself, the waters around it still look pretty tumultuous and bloody.
Another example is the recent, quiet demise of Netscape, which was the original commercial Internet browser, and once regarded as a great pioneer—but was made obsolete by subsequent entrants and developments it failed master.
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