How do you know? We don't know what George has created. What we do know is dat George made a functining digital camera, a bit hard if we don't have electronics.
Ah, so you are suggesting that: rather than George using commercially available products to cobble together a prototype digital camera, that he has a chip manufacturing division that went unremarked.
We could easily switch manufacturing lines. Tel me what is more hard? Starting our own company buying some chip maker, sourcing factories, and building an entire company from the ground up or buying a camera company and talk to people who work for us now and telling them to set up a digital camera line with our tech.
Switching manufacturing lines from producing a chemical film-based photographic system to a digital-image capture is not easy- and possibly involves having to significantly remodel the factory. So, no, that is not really persuasive. The point with buying the chip manufacturer is to focus R&D and manufacturing towards the fields that help our interests.
Polaroid made 1.45 Billion in sales for 1980 so I don't think 250 million is a reasonable enough price. I'll compromise and drop down to 400 million since a NYT article in 1981 says that was the net worth of the company.
The revenue really doesn't matter that much- it is the net profit that matters. And, as a NYT article in '82 pointed out: in 1980, Polaroid netted $85.4 million dollars. In '82, that dropped to $31.1 million.
Which makes sense because Polaroid's was focused on consumer cameras which was steadily shrinking from its heights in the 1970's. Note that at this time Kodak was still very thriving. Since Kodak (which had revenues, if you want to compare sizes) had 4 billion in '78 in sales, we could guess that it is at least 3 times larger than Polaroid in-game (actually not even close- Kodak was in the top 50 list for Forbes in 1980 when Polaroid didn't make the top 500- they don't go lower than that). So, we should probably go with what at least what asked for Kodak- $250 million. If it was good enough for Magoose to roll for on a much larger company, it is probably good enough now the next turn. With a company a fraction of the size or profitability.
And peak revenue was 3 billion in '91. But no guys it's a shrinking market.
I have kept the discussion fairly civil, I believe. If you want to start going sarcastic and aggressive, I can do that with the best of them. But, I do not think that would help in this game as evidenced by your last row with another player.
At it's peak, there was a uptick due to photographic revolutions such as 1 hour photos and the like. But, consumer photography was still a shrinking market from the 70's (as we are in the 80's, we use that high point as a reference) and is not really a great source of profit. As evidenced by the lack of influence of Kodak or Polaroid (questers are interested in the company partially because it failed).
It is the development of the technology for filmmaking that should interest us.
