I am leaving Kodak

After 6 years I am leaving Kodak. This move wasn't forced on me like it's been on others in the past few years, it was 100% my decision. I was generally happy with my co-workers and my role, so why did I decide to leave?



When I first started at Kodak I had a pretty narrow set of responsibilities. Over time I started taking on more and more things and doing them well. I pushed the boundaries of what my "job description" was and soon found myself at the center of almost all projects related to the web. It was a good place to be, owning something important while having a respected opinion on future projects.

Then January 19th hit with the announcement that Kodak was filing for bankruptcy. I had never worked for a company in Chapter 11 before, and knew no one else who had. This made things tough, trying to work through the uncertainty of what was going to happen and when. I had a casual eye open to job postings but now I felt like I needed to ramp up my search.

On the one hand I liked where the company was finally going, focusing on the Commercial side of the business and shedding the consumer side. On the other hand there still seemed to be an uncertainty on what exactly that meant in terms of what Kodak was going to offer the market. Over the last few months the dust seemed to settle on what businesses would make up the new Kodak.

Even with that going on I still had my doubts. It really boiled down to this:

The general decline of print - there are some really wonderful people in the printing business but there is no way to say this gently, print is dying. I just keep seeing the writing on the wall and its getting clearer and clearer. Any business with a dependence on revenue from print(manufacturers or publishers) will face a very tough next few years. All the innovation I see from hungry companies and people are directed at making the consumption of content easier/cheaper/better via electronic means. Its only a matter of time before everyone who advertisers want to reach is consuming media exclusively through a tablet type device. Now understand I am not saying all people, only the ones that matter to advertisers. So there will be printed things being delivered to people in the future, but are those people the ones that companies will be willing to spend serious money on to reach?

So I begin my next journey at a company called Qualitrol based in Fairport(5 minutes away from my house!). I will be the new Digital Marketing manager there and will build out various online marketing strategies. It's an exciting opportunity to me to have an ideal "best in class" framework to try to build to and I love the idea of going back to the smaller company culture I miss.