I spent about a decade in professional photofinishing and then digital reproduction, and had some pretty close ties with the eggheads in Rochester. I have mixed feeling about the company given they employed so many intelligent people but then wasted so many resources on dead-end projects with no vision of the future. The inside joke at the time was Kodak only cared about the aethestics of 50yr old professional photographers and not 20yr old professional photographers, and hence it's a big reason their film / paper division stalled and lost market share. Everybody threw a fit on their blog when Kodachrome was eliminated, but the fact is most pros abandoned the fickle emulsion a decade or more earlier for the better performing stuff in the green boxes that could be processed anywhere with greater consistency.
I'm hearing some of the same luddite explanations here I've heard for years, and ironically some of it is the same attitude I encountered with Kodak. First, color chromogenic films and papers (E6, C-41, RA-4, EP-2, etc) *do not* last in a pristine state for 20yrs, let alone 10 - Unless you have your color film stored in an argon sealed container at 50F. Even Kodachrome requires dark storage and low temperatures to reach it's much bragged about archival capabilities. Engineers I knew at Kodak were always uncomfortable about the claims of their marketing dept in this respect. Also, the display life of both Kodak and Fuji RA-4 papers is greatly exagerated, although pigment based ink-jet is rapidly displacing the medium. My pigment based ink-jet prints don't fade no matter what I do to them, but I can't say the same for displayed Endura and Crystal Archive Prints I have on walls which show problems in less than 10 years. A $100 desktop ink-jet printer now does a better job than a lab outfitted with $500,000 worth of wet-lab gear. When your income relies heavily on those labs buying chemicals, papers, service contracts and selling point and shoot film cameras chances are you are going to fall on hard times.
As for digital formats being orphaned, I'm sorry if you're still using Windows 3.11, Pagemaker, floppy disks and proprietary .PCX or .EPS formats. I don't have any issues opening 20yr old TGA files, TIFF files or any Photoshop medium. The bigger problem with digital content is making it go away in a few decades (see current Facebook fiasco) or not having your blockbuster movie shared instantly on pirate web-sites. Film, especially color film starts to degrade the second it comes out of the processor dryer not to mention good luck getting two existing labs to make the same looking print twice in a row. I'll take ones and zeros in a file format and not some mystery industrial film dye that reacts to airborne gases in unpredictable ways and depends on an impatient teenager for quality control.
One issue that's facing the entire industry right now is photofinishing is either flat in some market segments, or headed down. People are taking more pictures than ever right now, but they are posting those images to Facebook, Flickr, etc., and then are done with them. Malls, grocery stores and dept stores are booting their photolabs because they are losing money, and those people that are fussy about prints either use online pro labs, or print them themselves. I print all my high end stuff onto dye-transfer metal without any chemicals or Kodak gear in the loop, and the results are astounding. However, with due respect to Kodak, I know there are likely dozens of Kodak patents and software tables involved in the loop that allow me to get there.