Eastman Kodak Company

George Eastman founded Kodak in 1888 with a product so simple its marketing slogan wrote itself: "You press the button, we do the rest." Before Kodak, photography required professional training, heavy equipment, and chemical expertise. Eastman's camera came pre-loaded with film for 100 exposures. You sent the entire camera back to Kodak, who developed the film and returned the camera reloaded. Photography became accessible to ordinary people for the first time.

In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the world's first digital camera — a device the size of a toaster that captured 0.01 megapixel images onto a cassette tape. When Sasson demonstrated it to Kodak management, the response was not enthusiasm. Executives asked him not to tell anyone about it. The digital camera would make film obsolete. Film was Kodak's entire business model. The invention was shelved.

In 1996, Kodak was at its zenith — a $28 billion company with 145,000 employees worldwide, controlling 80% of the U.S. film market. The Kodak Moment had entered the cultural lexicon. Every significant family event — births, weddings, graduations — was documented on Kodak film. The company was so dominant that the U.S. government had required it to license patents to competitors to prevent monopoly abuse.

Digital cameras began displacing film cameras in the late 1990s. Kodak knew this was coming — it had invented the technology — but was trapped by what business theorists later called the "innovator's dilemma": its most profitable customers (amateur photographers buying film) were exactly the people that digital photography would eliminate. Kodak launched digital cameras but priced them to protect film sales. Competitors with no film business priced digital cameras to grow market share. Kodak lost.

Kodak filed for bankruptcy in January 2012 — 133 years after its founding. The company's most valuable remaining assets were its patent portfolio, which it auctioned for $525 million. The buyers included Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung — the companies that had built the digital photography industry on foundations Kodak had laid and then abandoned. The company that had invented digital photography sold its patents to the companies that had commercialised it.