The Rise of Digital imaging and the Fall of the Old Camera industry

I ran into the pictures below in autumn 2006. They are taken inside the new Hasselblad building that the company moved to in 2003. However, one year later – the building is empty. Having suffered from losses and layoffs, the legendary Hasselblad balanced at the brink of bankruptcy and had to move into a smaller building, a few blocks away, still in the city centre of Gothenburg, Sweden. The shift to digital imaging put the company in great trouble and huge losses had been generated in 2002-2004.

Photos:www.jornmark.se
I was amazed by these pictures and asked myself why the company had failed so miserably in this shift. After having read a bit about Hasselblad, I realized that it is a myth that the company did not recognize the digital threat. In fact, Hasselblad started to explore digital imaging in various applications in the early 1980s – and still, the company was collapsing once the digital avalanche came into motion in the early 2000s.
Back in 2006, I was about to ...