The person who decides is not the person who uses it.

In December 1975, a twenty-four-year-old electrical engineer at Eastman Kodak named Steven Sasson assembled a device the size of a toaster from spare parts and a CCD chip borrowed from Fairchild Semiconductor. It captured a black-and-white image with no film at all, storing it on a digital cassette tape. It took twenty-three seconds. It was the first digital camera ever built.

Sasson demonstrated it to Kodak's technical staff first, and by most accounts, they were fascinated. The people who understood the engineering — the users, in a sense, of the idea itself — recognised immediately what they were looking at. Then Sasson took it to the executives who would decide its fate, and the reaction was different. Polite. Unbothered. According to Sasson's own account, the response amounted to: that is cute, but do not tell anyone about it.

Kodak did patent the technology in 1978. It did not rush the camera to market. It is worth being precise about why, because the popular version of this story — that Kodak was simply blind to the future — is not quite accurate, and the more accurate version is more useful.

A decision made correctly, for the wrong constituency

The executives who saw Sasson's prototype were not stupid, and they were not, in 1975, wrong about the near-term market. A toaster-sized camera that took a black-and-white image in thirty milliseconds and needed twenty-three seconds to record it was not a consumer product yet. There was no infrastructure to view or share a digital image. The technology was, by any reasonable commercial judgment at the time, years away from being sellable.

But the deeper decision Kodak's leadership was making was not really about the camera's readiness. It was about what the camera implied for Kodak's business, which was built, floor to ceiling, on selling film. A filmless camera did not compete with a Kodak product. It made the entire category of Kodak products optional. The engineers who loved Sasson's invention were responding to what it could become. The executives who shelved it were responding to what it would cost the business they already had.

This is the pattern Sol Gravitas sees constantly in B2B research, stripped of the Kodak-sized stakes but identical in shape: the person who understands a product best, and the person who decides whether to buy or greenlight it, are very often not the same person, and they are frequently not even weighing the same question. Confusing the two is one of the most consistent and expensive mistakes in product development and sales strategy.

Why this mistake is so easy to make

A product team building something genuinely useful naturally spends most of its time with the people who will use it — and those conversations are encouraging, because the product solves a real problem for a real user. It is easy to mistake user enthusiasm for market readiness. The user's answer to "is this good" and the decision-maker's answer to "should we adopt this" are shaped by entirely different incentives, entirely different risks, and frequently entirely different information.

Kodak's engineers were asking whether the technology worked. Kodak's leadership was asking what it would do to a business model that, in 1975, was still extraordinarily profitable. Both were reasoning correctly from where they sat. Neither question, on its own, was the complete picture — and the gap between them is exactly where strategic decisions get made or missed.

For a business trying to sell into an organisation, the practical lesson is not abstract. It means the enthusiasm of the person who will use a product — the operations manager, the engineer, the frontline team — is real signal, but it is not the same signal as the willingness of the person who authorises the purchase. Decision-maker profiling exists because the person who will say yes is often invisible from where the product conversation is happening, and finding them, understanding what they are actually weighing, is a separate piece of work from building something good.

Sasson stayed at Kodak, kept working on the technology, and in 1989 built what is generally considered the first true DSLR. Kodak's marketing department, by his account, resisted that too — not because it did not work, but because of what it would still cost the film business. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The invention that might have carried it into the next era was, by then, everyone else's industry.

Think with Insights.