Kodak is now pretty much out of the digital imaging business. Having previously closed down its camera division and sold off its sensor group, today the deal to sell the remaining intellectual property was agreed to by the company, and now awaits approval by the bankruptcy court.
But look at the 12 tech companies that stepped in to buy the digital imaging technology patents: Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Fujifilm, Google, HTC, Huawei, Microsoft, RIM, Samsung, and Shutterfly. Fujifilm is in there partly to protect their own existing digital imaging patents, which intersect with Kodak's. But the rest are all future-of-imaging companies, not existing digital camera companies.
Those camera and software companies that are licensing Kodak patents (or should be ;~) will now be paying their tithe to Intellectual Ventures, which is acquiring the existing licenses and the rights to those licenses outside the group of 12 I noted earlier. That would include Canon, Nikon, and Sony, amongst others.
The camera companies are now in much the same position as the old IBM PC cloners were in the late 80's and early 90's. There, Intel and Microsoft (the Wintel IP) drove the industry, so the hardware makers sought customers by cutting costs and profit margins and drove themselves to the bottom (and for many, eventually out). Remember Dell? Their disruption was to remove the middleman in sales, not necessarily to build products that were highly distinguished in IP from others.
As I've pointed out many times in the last seven years, the camera companies are boxing themselves in. They will need a real disruption to change their fate. So far, I see no evidence that they fully understand that and have a plan for reinventing themselves. Iteration only takes them so far, and the market dynamics have already shifted away from cameras being the primary image takers in the world.
The thing that saddens me is that I see evidence that the camera companies are getting less customer friendly. It's not just Nikon, though they certainly have been on a tear recently with policies and non-policies that impact customer service. I hear it about other camera companies too, as they tighten their budgets and try to drive costs out. The end result is that this just accelerates the race to the bottom, as price and more rapid iteration start to become the only things that differentiate.
I've written before that the digital camera industry is ripe for a Harvard MBA school case study. Turns out, that's happening. Today's news is just another piece of the puzzle that future MBA students will look at to try to figure out what the companies should have done.