In the Ninetees I was pretty close to Polaroid. Doing marketing for the tape division of JVC Pola was one of our biggest OEM customers. Our price/quantity/production meetings had been hard but very fair and after the office very friendly. I rember my visits in Cambridge and the after business visits of Legal Seafood or Martha' vinyard or Cape Cod........great.......and long gone.
During the patent fight between Pola and Kodak I had to create my biggest spreadsheet of all time: We supported Pola by storing their complete order quantity to allow them to get a better cash situation. Our japaneese account managers, calculating with an Abakus-yes coulnd't believe how fast Excel could be.
In all these years I always forgot to ask something about their cameras, mainly the ugly plastic boxes with strange designs.
The SX-70 aka 'Aladin' was in the seventies a mega-in product as the first Sony walkman or the first iPod.
At the Cote Azur the 'Better People' had the SX-70 and you could hear in/out/beside the expensive restaurants of St. Tropez, Nice or Cannes the buzz and whirl of the transport mechanism......
Today I have a SX-70, Pola 600 and the pro 180. Different philosophy of taking pictures and I'm not so close to it but like the 'spirit' in it.
BTW: Mr Land the founder was one of the first 'Greens' over there. During my first visit of the factory it was totally hidden in the forest and at the head of each assy-line there had been big containers with green flowers to allow the workers to look at plants and not only machinery.
Pola is gone, Kodak may follow, it was a battle at that time which no one had won.......