In the 1970s, Kodak scientists developed the world's first viable OLED material. Today, they're selling the business to LG to keep their drowning ship afloat. It's been a rough decade.It's been so long since Kodak's been relevant that it's easy to forget how much they've pioneered. Today, though, they've been reduced to a case study in what happens when companies built on increasingly obsolete technology are slow to evolve. Kodak's OLED business is good example of what's gone wrong: they've made some nice (though questionably necessary) advances with it, but don't have any TV or monitor presence with which to leverage it. So now they've handed it off to LG, who'll save fistloads of cash by having access to Kodak's "fundamental" OLED intellectual property portfolio, while Kodak will use whatever money they got out of the sale to buy down some debt and make some perfectly adequate printers.
To keep the metaphors coming: Kodak hasn't so much passed the torch as they have sold the farm. [BusinessWire via Endgadget]
