I have to disagree with a comment a way back up the thread that "George Eastman would be kicking some booty" over the current course of Kodak.
I think, rather, he'd be leading the charge. He didn't build up the Kodak brand by making Daguerreotype plates while everyone else was selling dry gelatin plates; he did it by inventing flexible film and consumer photography. Today, he wouldn't be spending money trying to keep B&W going, he'd be forging ahead in digital -- though I doubt he'd do it by buying other companies; rather, he'd grow the expertise within the company.
Whether he'd precipitately abandon B&W is another issue -- the "old" Kodak we all knew as youngsters still made film packs into the 1970s, and didn't discontinue 122 "postcard" film until almost 1980; 620 lasted until around 1990, almost forty years after the last Kodak 620 format camera rolled off the line. But neither did the "old" Kodak try to keep those formats going once sales dropped enough it no longer paid to cut that width, or print that backing paper, or fabricate those spools. C-22 wasn't supported for too many years after C-41 came along, even though there surely were those who said their favorite Kodacolor-X was superior to this newfangled Kodacolor II.
This isn't a new way of doing business for Kodak -- but like everything else related to digital technology, it happens a bit faster than those of us who grew up before computers were on every desk are used to. So, Kodak is jumping off the B&W train -- and they're giving us warning by dropping paper (slower selling and less profitable than film, most likely) first. We can still get lots of B&W papers, and if all else fails, Kodak does still make their monochrome RA-4 material (not archival, but at least it's B&W). And in large format, we still have the option to print on salted paper, or albumen, or POP, or cyanotype, or platinum, even when Azo and Polycontrast IV and whatever else are gone -- even if the Ilford and Oriental papers follow Kodak down the drain and we never manage to get that green cast out of the Fomabrom...
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