In trying to understand what is going on with Polaroid, I keep coming back to the impossibly heavy briefcase I carried around almost 20 years ago.
Polaroid Corp., one of the most successful and glamorous American companies of the 20th Century, is bankrupt. This month a private equity arm of Bank One Corp. offered to buy Polaroid’s assets for a reported $265 million, which amounts to a fire sale — Polaroid’s sales at one time exceeded $2 billion a year. The financial side of this is far from over, but the old Polaroid, it seems, is a goner.
So what happened? How could Polaroid have done things differently?
There may be no satisfactory answer to that question — which leads me to the heavy briefcase.
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It was given to me on loan by a company that was manufacturing it. Inside the briefcase were all the elements that allowed a person to make a telephone call without being in his home or office or car. There was an extraordinarily weighty battery built into the briefcase; there were mechanical components; there was a full-size telephone handset, with a thick cord. There was room for nothing else in the briefcase — the phone hardware and giant battery took up the entire inside — and it weighed about as much as a large, fully packed suitcase.
But you could make a telephone call from your briefcase. I had borrowed it so that I could write a column for Esquire about it — it was such a new and unusual idea that Esquire gave it two pages. You could walk down the street, open your briefcase, and call someone — and the people on the street would stare, as if you had just landed in a flying saucer. You could pop open the briefcase in a restaurant and make a call — and other diners would come over, just to look and ask questions. Amazing — a telephone in a briefcase.
Several years later, I was putting together a book of columns and was selecting which columns from the past few years to include. As soon as I got to the column about the briefcase phone, I automatically tossed it into the discard pile. It was already archaic. Why?
You know the reason why. The briefcase phone — heavy, cumbersome — became outmoded almost as soon as it was introduced. The small phones you can stick in your pocket were about to hit the market — and when they hit, the company that had developed the briefcase phone was out of luck.
Polaroid’s luck lasted considerably longer. The company’s founder, Edwin Land, has been described as “the archetype of the inventor-entrepreneur … a combination of Edison and Houdini.” The company he founded first manufactured new-style sunglasses and 3-D movies. But after World War II — in 1948 — Polaroid introduced a camera and film that produced instant photographs, and one of the great triumphs in U.S. commerce was on its way.
Even the name had the sound of futuristic success — “Polaroid” had the tone and cadence of space travel, before there was space travel. The early Polaroid cameras were clunky — it took 60 seconds for the pictures to develop, you had to peel a sticky backing from the photo, you had to rub the finished black-and-white picture with a gooey stick of pink chemical — but people loved the novelty of it. They had to have Polaroid cameras. And as the process was refined, and color Polaroids eventually were introduced, Polaroid became an American icon.
So what happened?
Same thing that happened to the briefcase phone. If you want to see your photos instantly today, digital cameras provide that. Polaroid — of all companies — didn’t see the future coming. There were warning signs of Polaroid’s being stuck in the mud; in 1977, with great fanfare, Polaroid introduced something called Polavision — an instant home-movie camera and projector and instant movie film that had been devised, at great expense, by Polaroid’s scientists. Terrible timing — Polavision came along just as video cameras were about to be introduced. Who would want Polavision film, when videotape was available?
Now the question is: Can Polaroid be saved? If it can, someone’s going to have to come up with a great and unthought-of idea, and quickly. An idea as good as instant photography was back when that concept wasn’t ho-hum. If anyone has such an idea, let me know. I’ll be waiting for my briefcase to ring.
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– Bob Greene comments on the news of the day Thursdays on the “WGN News at Nine.”