RCA and You

[N2IXK]

Originally Posted by etype2

RCA could have cornered the market with flat screens, at least for a decade or so. They invented the LCD display, owned the first Patents, (1967) but they did not have the vision to see the potential. They did not want them to compete with their CRT's. They were drunk with years of success with their CRT sets and had no interest in investing more R&D. They had a team of engineers on the LCD project all begging the top brass at RCA to go further to no avail.

Sounds like the same combination of shortsightedness and hubris that killed Eastman Kodak.

They essentially invented digital photography, back in the 1970s, but the management didn't want it to cannibalize their bread and butter film sales. So they sat on the patents and basically did nothing with them. Once the patents expired, it was too late for Kodak to dominate the industry, and the technology took off and killed the film market anyway. A great video presentation by former Kodak engineer Steve Sasson is available here:

http://vimeo.com/31404047

, which goes into the technical details of the invention, and touches on the piss-poor business decisions that eventually killed the company.