Kodak & Motorola Try Again.........

Motorola and Kodak Announce Global Mobile-Imaging Partnership: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Kodak and Motorola announced a 10-year mobile-imaging partnership at CES yesterday. There is a bit of irony in this announcement as Kodak & Moto had worked closely in the 90's on developing CMOS image sensors. This original parnership grew out of George Fisher's taking the helm at Kodak from his position running Motorola. It never really yielded the expected results. Now Motorola will be buying CMOS image sensors from Kodak that are based on both internal and aquired technology (Kodak bought Nat'l Semi's imaging sensor group in 2004) and manufactured at IBM fabs. Motorola has been moving further and further away from semiconductor manufacturing. They have spun out Freescale and their IBM PowerPC partnership is loosing Apple, its anchor customer, to Intel.

In my opinion this is a great move for Kodak since they can add value to the Motorola partnership beyond just being a component supplier and the CMOS imager market is brutally competitive. They get a high volume customer for their sensors while gaining an opportunity to create stronger linkage to some of their other products and services. Moto also gets access to Kodak's extensive patent protfolio in online and mobile imaging which will come more and more into play in the future.

The biggest question I have with this partnership is the role and cooperation of the carriers as they have proven to be an obstacle that has been difficult to overcome. Ultimately, it is the carriers who purchase and sell Moto phones to consumers. They have shown a desire to control services such as picture messaging and sharing vs. partnering. Kodak Mobile is offered by some as an optional application, not the default. This is where Kodak's patent portfolio can become a useful stick to nudge the Carriers to broaden their views.

As someone who ran Strategic Alliances at Kodak, I wish then luck. Partnerships like this are a challenge to manage but hopefully their history working together in the past will make this one a success. These are two US companies that I for one would like to see as winners.