Imagine Apple if Steve Jobs never returned. Imagine it had continued to allow poor-quality machines with the Mac OS onboard to be sold. Imagine if it had continued to dilute its brand and its influence, allowing everything good about the Mac to ebb away while a hardcore of fans cried foul. Without the presciding central intelligence of Steve Jobs, there’s every chance Apple would have gone down.

That’s what happened to Polaroid. An iconic brand originally guided by the vision of one amazing man, Edwin Land, was squandered on bad products. The strong central idea of Polaroid instant photos was disgarded and the solid presence of the brand was wasted. The great packaging design spearheaded by Paul Giambarba was left behind and executives became happy to put out poor quality products in ugly boxes, to allow the digital world to sweep the analogue beauty away. 

But Polaroid fought hard against the dying of the light. People still loved those little instant snaps. There was a hardcore of Polaroid lovers who would have bought Polaroid products forever. The average Polaroid owners only bought 5 film packs in the entire lifetime of their cameras but the obsessives bought many times that.

When I wrote about The Impossible Project, the band of dreamers and geniuses that brought the Polaroid instant film factory in Holland back to life and developed their own compatible brand of instant film, I discovered a mindboggling fact: Polaroid film didn’t die because of lack of demand. It died because the executives let it. 

A decision was made by Polaroid head office that the firm should stop ordering the chemicals to make the film  and just ride their stockpile out for what they thought would be at least 10 years. But they miscalculated the level of demand. 24 million film packs were shipped from the Dutch Polaroid factory in 2008 alone.

Polaroid and the last vestiges of its original form died on June 14, 2008. Since then collectors and fans have scoured the web and the world in general for the last remaining stock and the DNA of the true Polaroid has transferred to the brilliant team at The Impossible Project who are producing instant film for Polaroid cameras. 

But the Polaroid name has been sold and horse-traded countless times in the past 20 years. It is now owned by a consortium of business types with a love of Lady Gaga who they have called in as creative director. She swore and postured during the CES press conference in a way that would have angered Edwin Land immensely.

Out of three products revealed by Polaroid from the Lady Gaga Grey Label collection, only one was in its working state. Bobby Sager, the new head of Polaroid, stood beside her dressed in a curious outfit with sneakers on his feet and a cardigan tied around his shoulders. It’s a curious outfit because in reality Sager is a Boston bruiser with a hard-nosed business sense. He ain’t no Lady Gaga loving dilettante whatever image he wanted to pedal in Vegas. 

The New Polaroid is like New Coke – a terrible idea. It now pumps out crappy television, awful digital photo frames and instant cameras that look like they were designed by some state-owned skunk work in a former Soviet State. Lady Gaga could not care less about Polaroid or its heritage.

Polaroid is just another Lady Gaga brand extension and fair play to her really, the necrophiliacs now screwing Polaroid senseless are paying her a pretty penny for the publicity she can draw for them. Polaroid is dead and buried and every press story you read about its resurrection is a crock, a lazy regurgitation of one of the firms numerous Gaga-picture-stuffed press releases. Want the soul of instant photography? Look to The Impossible Project.