A Tale of Two Cities

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, ....

This is the beginning of the novel and influences a lot of people. The cities are London & Paris and the historical background is the French Revolution. Here I limit the scope to something different but the meaning is just as significant as Dickens' novel.

Rochester is a city on the southern shore of Lake Ontario in western New York. It is the third most populous city in New York state, after NY city and Buffalo with a population in the metropolitan area of over 1 million people. Rochester is the site of many important inventions and innovations in consumer products. It has been the birthplace to Kodak, Western Union, Bausch/Lomb and Xerox, which conduct extensive research and manufacture of industrial and consumer products. Until 2010, this metropolitan area was the second-largest regional economy in NY State. 

Kodak was founded by George Eastman and Henry Strong in 1888. During most of the 20th century, Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film. The company creates its famous "Kodak Moment" tagline which entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that was demanded to be recorded for posterity. The company Kodak and its film business such as Kodachrome and slide photo display were so popular in the 20th century that almost controls the photo market 100%. Kodak began to struggle in the decade of 1990, as the result of the decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in transitioning to digital photography. As a part of a turnaround strategy, Kodak began to focus on digital photography and digital printing, and attempted to generate revenues through aggressive patent litigation. However, it was apparently too late to recover or reverse the declining trend. In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US District Court. After that, Kodak announced that it would stop making digital cameras and digital picture frames and focus on the corporate digital imaging market. In 2013, the company emerged from bankruptcy having shed its large legacy liabilities and exited several businesses. Eventually Kodak sold most of its patents and stopped its photographic products, a sad historical event. 

Now there is another city, Rochester in Minnesota. Rochester is a city in southern Minnesota.  It is located almost on the same latitude of Rochester in New York. It's the birthplace of a renowned healthcare organization, the Mayo Clinic. 

On August 21, 1883, a great tornado demolished much of Rochester, leaving 37 dead and approximately 200 injured. As there was no medical facility in the immediate area at the time, Dr. Mayo and his two sons worked together to care for the wounded. Donations of US$60,000 were collected and the Sisters of St. Francis, assisted by Mayo, opened a new facility named St. Marys Hospital in 1889, just one year after Kodak founded. 

The Mayo practice grew and is today among the largest and most well-respected medical facilities in the world. Many notable people from around the world, including many former US presidents, have visited Rochester as patients of the Mayo Clinic. 

It is interesting to compare the two cities with their enterprising business and the impact to the welfare of the cities. First, both Kodak and Mayo are the key and major industry and employer of the cities. Second, they started about the same time in the late last century, 1888 and 1889. Third, both companies flourish for almost about 100 years and achieving a great success in their own industry, photography and health/medicine. Fourth, after 1990, dramatic change happens to Kodak and continues its struggle to survive. Meanwhile, Mayo Clinic fares completely different. It continues its success in the health and medicine area. Mayo Clinic becomes the top and #1 hospital in the country and it has held that position for more than at least five decades.

What seems to be the reason of this dramatic difference between Kodak & Mayo Clinic. Kodak can not be excused from the mistake it did not try to take digital photography seriously and converts its business toward the future technology. But the main point or reason we should consider or not oversee one factor that is the different industry they reside in---one in photography and the other in medicine.

Silicon Valley is the hotbed of the high tech industry. Since 1965, many new electronic companies set up their companies in the valley and developed transistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors, calculators, personal computers, local area networks, ... etc. The new products included instruments used in the medical industry and digital camera and display devices used in photographic industry. Kodak took notes and understood the impact. But it chose to shelf the digital photo camera even it got it first. Until decade of 1990, Kodak finally realized the timing and impact, but it is too late for the conversion. Now we take a look of the case of Mayo Clinic. It is in the medicine field and the structure of the human body never changes. Even the instruments like microscope, MRI scanning machine, ultrasound tracing, photo-acoustic imaging, computer assisted surgical devices and electronic tracing instruments are useful and valuable, Mayo Clinic only needs to purchase them and since it doesn't develop them and so doesn't risk the development on the wrong instruments. This minor difference actually makes the whole difference between the future of Kodak and Mayo Clinic.