Wasn't it Kodak's focus to sell film? And, by extension, enabling its customers to share their pictures? In a sense Instagram would be a modern day analogue of such a company -- just that it doesn't need a hardware division anymore.
But I still see your point. It isn't the best comparison, and using it as a quotation does not bode well for his book, IMO.
Eh... I'd break it down more finely. Kodak produced the image storage mechanism, not the sharing mechanism. The sharing analogue to Instagram would be something like a post card, or a group of sharers using the postal service.
The analogue to film would be the hard drive or memory device in the camera on which digital images are stored. So whoever makes those is the new Kodak.
They'd still be selling them if Kodak management hadn't thrown away the chance to move to digital. Kodak research was THE pioneer in digital photography. It got killed because it posed a threat to the film, paper, and chemistry divisions.
Film, paper, and chemistry, yes. The "Kodak" model probably still taught in Marketing 101 is "Give away the camera and sell the film" (sometimes also known as the "Gillette" model, give away the razor and sell the blades).
It all fell apart when nobody needed film and everyone (for the most part) stopped printing pictures.
I don't really see instagram as a factor one way or the other. Kodak was dead anyway, at least the "film, paper and chemistry" part.
This is a commonly told version of the tale, but I don't think it's accurate. Kodak didn't get blindsided by the advent of digital, in fact they were the first ones there (literally the first commercial DSLR was a Kodak).
Their main problem appeared to be both technological and competitive. In the very early stages of digital SLRs Kodak provided sensors to all of the big players, establishing themselves as the go-to OEM for sensor tech.
And then Canon decided to not put the most important component of their camera in someone else's hands, and folded sensor tech into their own company as a core component. This was also the age where Canon was eating Nikon for lunch through superior design and marketing, so Kodak lost not only a large customer, but their remaining ones were being pummeled in the market.
Nikon followed soon afterward, though in the long run they were unable to sustain their own semiconductor R&D and now run primarily Sony sensors.
Kodak went from the go-to OEM for sensor technology to nibbling at the extremely niche sector of scientific equipment photo sensors and rich-surgeon-toy cameras like the Leica M9. It's a sad tale really, and while I'm sure Kodak had many opportunities to avoid their demise, the whole story isn't quite a textbook tale of ridiculously bad management.
Nowadays there are few companies actually building digital sensors. Canon is the big one, Sony is the next big one (which also power Panasonic, Olympus, Nikon, Pentax, and Sony's own cameras). Samsung is the straggler - their OEM business has gone kaput in recent years, but they are still building sensors for their own cameras (which are largely failing in the market). Fuji is the standout in the pack, still making their own sensors despite being comparatively a tiny fish in the pond.
Have you read The Innovator's Dilemma and its followup The Innovator's Solution?
I'm pretty sure that Kodak was one of the cases discussed. If not, it deserved to be because it was a classic example of the perverse incentives that destroy incumbents.
Kodak realized the future. Kodak invented it. But their film business dominated from a revenue perspective. At every point where they had to make a resource allocation decision, the fact that film was the cash cow gave people from that division weight, and nobody in other departments really wanted to kill that sacred cow.
When Canon decided to not depend on Kodak, they were not just doing that because they wanted to be independent, but also because they recognized that Kodak's priorities didn't match theirs. I wouldn't be surprised if the design advantages that Canon had were not there in part because they didn't have any internal politics around protecting a legacy cash cow.
Kodak made the first digital camera in 1975. It's pretty amazing to compare it to current cameras, since it's about the size of a bowling ball and took 23 seconds to record a 0.01 megapixel picture onto a cassette tape. http://www.retrothing.com/2008/05/kodaks-first-di.html
But I still see your point. It isn't the best comparison, and using it as a quotation does not bode well for his book, IMO.