>They got outcompeted because they were a photography company, not a digital hardware manufacturer. Companies like Sony or Canon did better because they were in the business of consumer electronics / hardware already.
Huh? This makes no sense. Sony was indeed a consumer electronics company at that time, but Canon was not: Canon was a camera manufacturer. They didn't get into electronics until later as cameras became digital: their earlier cameras were the all-mechanical kind. Sony was an electronics company that had to learn how to make cameras, but Canon was a camera company that had to learn how to make electronics. Kodak could have done the same.
Kodak, while they incidentally made some cameras, were a film and film processing company that wasn’t great at cameras and wasn’t anything in electronics.
They were much worse positioned than either a camera company, or a consumer electronics company, for a pivot to the post-film photography world.
Canon was only a camera company when it started, but by the 1960s was moving into other markets like lenses, magnetic heads, photocopiers, fax machines, etc.
Kodak could have diversified like that too, but they didn't. They were positioned badly because they concentrated almost all their efforts on film and nothing else. Of course, part of this is probably due to American business culture compared to Japanese; Japanese businesses tend to be much more diverse and long-term in thinking, but regardless, Kodak did this to themselves.
Agreed but my additional point is that Kodak actually did branch out beyond film, and did so pretty well from a technical POV.
The problem was competing in hardware manufacturing, which is a whole different ballgame from concentrating on just the imaging aspects of it. So they were reduced, near the end, to just being really a (decent) component supplier to other companies. But that's the wrong part of the food chain to be in.
Huh? This makes no sense. Sony was indeed a consumer electronics company at that time, but Canon was not: Canon was a camera manufacturer. They didn't get into electronics until later as cameras became digital: their earlier cameras were the all-mechanical kind. Sony was an electronics company that had to learn how to make cameras, but Canon was a camera company that had to learn how to make electronics. Kodak could have done the same.