Eastman Kodak was the Apple of its day, but that was a long time ago.

Now the once-great photography company seems to think its future lies in being little more than a patent troll, a company that exists mainly to sue other companies over intellectual property. The future is so bleak that Kodak is even contemplating bankruptcy.

Consumers who remember buying large quantities of Kodak film and getting it developed on Kodak paper probably never imagined that such an indispensable company would become irrelevant in less than a generation. Glenn MacDonald, though, says he predicted Kodak's demise more than a decade ago.

MacDonald, the Olin professor of economics and strategy at Washington University, did consulting work for Kodak in the 1990s when he taught at the University of Rochester. In 1999, he recalls, he told top executives that they should essentially liquidate the company and return money to shareholders.

They should have taken his advice: In a dozen years, the company's revenue has fallen by half and the value of its shares has shrunk by 99 percent, to $140 million from $20 billion. It has lost money in six of the past seven years.

Kodak was a victim of its own success. "Everything about the place was wrong," MacDonald says. "All of the senior people were steeped in film, and they were dead set against electronics; they just didn't want to do it. The death knell for any project was if it negatively affected the 35-millimeter film business."

So it is that Kodak, which built one of the first digital cameras in the 1970s (and thus has the patents that it's trying to enforce today, with lawsuits against Apple and others), quickly became an also-ran when consumers decided they liked shooting pictures on memory cards rather than film.

Kodak actually made a competitive digital camera in the mid-1990s, but its strategy had always been to sell cheap cameras that would entice people to buy a lot of profitable film. Digital photography didn't work that way, so Kodak didn't invest enough in it. Canon, Nikon and others introduced cameras with vastly improved image quality, and Kodak couldn't keep up.

Kodak later made an unsuccessful foray into pharmaceuticals and has tried to reinvent itself as a digital printing company, but that's a tough business in which to make money.

Nothing, it seems, can replace the monopoly-like profits that 35mm film once produced.

The decline didn't have to be this severe. Fuji, Kodak's Japanese competitor, has ventured into cosmetics (using some of the same chemistry it learned from the photo business) and optical films for flat-panel screens.

Successful transitions exist in other industries too. IBM jettisoned its personal computers, correctly seeing that they had become a low-cost commodity, to focus on technology consulting. Monsanto ditched petrochemicals to concentrate on genetically modified seeds.

Kodak, it seems, was only good at one thing, and that thing has gone out of fashion.

"There was never a good option for Kodak," MacDonald says now. "They're not a stupid company; they're a very smart company. They're just in a bad place. There's nothing wrong with the New York Yankees as a baseball team, but if you tell them they have to become a football team, they just can't do it."

The next Kodak moment, it appears, may be one the company would prefer to forget.