35 years to get back to status quo. Putting a bullet in a golden goose is often considered a bad idea. Everyone is happy they are dead, but if you can't understand why they might try to keep the corpse alive you have never looked at the numbers.
At its peak Kodak was one of the (the?) most well known brands on the entire planet. Anywhere in the world if someone snapped a photo Kodak was more than likely taking a cut, coming and going. They employed as many people in Rochester alone as any digital camera company does today internationally.
Sure it could have been managed better but they were always doomed for a fall. They were a chemical company entering a digital age. Does anybody even care who makes the sensors in iPhones?
IBM was the same way, ironically, the fourth Yankee clipper company had to be dragged into using two types of glasses sitting on the shelf that were patented/created in the early 1960s, both of which later became known as gorilla glass. Steve Jobs had to call them (Corning) multiple times to get them to finally let him use it on the iPhone. Imagine if Steve had contracted out to some other glass company in the far east?
Having the first portable-ish digital camera they could have seen the true value of Fairchild's CCD business, got a stake/bought it/replicated done whatever it took to push the frontier of digital imaging and became the Kodak (old, film-era Kodak) of electronic imaging?
There's no comparable business today because all the things they could have invested in ended up being taken up by different companies, they had the R&D culture, revenue, and distribution. I don't see why they couldn't have been category defining.
Only if you ignore the digital camera sector responsible for probably 99% of all digital photos taken…