A while back Kodak bought Ofoto, an online picture album site whose business model was making money from providing prints of the terabytes of images that it store for free. Unfortunately, there's one small problem: most people don't print digital photos.

The heart of Kodak's digital strategy for serving the everyday snapshot artist has been Ofoto.com, an online company that Kodak acquired in June 2001 for $58 million. The service, which stores photos for free forever and then charges for making and mailing out prints, had 1.2 million customers when Kodak bought it; that has surged to 13 million members. Digital photographers, however, take scores of images but make few prints. Meaning: The company still doesn't know when it will turn a profit with Ofoto.

From Eastman Kodak: Picture Imperfect
Referenced Wed Sep 15 2004 10:14:35 GMT-0600

Baseline uses this opening in an analysis of Kodak's business in a post-digital age. One of the things Kodak is trying is to create standards for photo printing. This is an interesting article, but it didn't make me want to go out and but Kodak stock. Kodak is a big company whose business model has been disrupted in a classic Clayton Christensen style.