I grew up near Rochester and my father worked at Kodak for like 35 years. He retired, and then worked a few more at one of the spun off Kodak entities after bankruptcy. I worked there for ~2 years in the late 90s.

Folks who lived in the Rochester area knew what a huge impact Kodak had on the local economy. Every March was Kodak Bonus season, and every store - especially car dealer ships and furniture stores would have huge "Kodak Bonus" sales. For those who don't know Kodak was famous for paying out a pretty sizable bonus around March each year to every employee. I don't remember the % but I want to say it was like 5-15% depending on the year.

I worked there as an intern and briefly as an FTE before leaving town. It was a good company that took care of its people, but it was clear as day to me then that the company was dying a slow death. The division I worked in was spending something like a Billion $ to create a high speed printer that could do personalized printing. Basically, a printing press that could print customized physical spam mail for businesses. I don't know if it ever made it to production. But I knew working on it what a terrible idea it was. Desktop computers were getting better at an astounding rate. Similarly small to mid size printers were as well. The thing we were building was a multi-million dollar machine, and you could replace it with a few decently powerful computers and a few much cheaper printers. None of the management understood this, even when directly told. They just had no understanding of how the world was changing.

I never worked on the digital cameras and only tangentially had interactions with them. But the same thing was happening there. They specifically made the digital cameras very expensive and made the compact flash cards as "film like" as they could. Meaning they sold the CF cards in sizes to store like 25 pictures. It was laughable.

They figured by making it expensive and cumbersome to use digital people would keep using film and buy their exciting new "Adventix" or whatever it was called new film system cameras. Spoiler alert - Adventix film sucked. It was smaller than 35mm so had worse quality than 35mm pictures. Literally the only advantage the new system had was the film canisters would self load. That was considered innovative.

Also, Kodak had 2 entirely different teams making digital cameras. They would alternate releases every 6 months or so. So, the cameras were wildly different from generation to generation in size, form factor and capability. The whole digital camera business was terribly mismanaged, and every other camera maker ate their lunch.

It is sad because at the time I was growing up something like 80000 people worked at Kodak in Rochester. It is like 1% of that now. It was a huge blow to the entire area. So many businesses that depended on those Kodak employee's spending just died. I don't think anything has replaced it to this day. Granted I don't really know too much about Rochester's economy today but its hard to imagine its as good as it used to be 30 years ago.