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Cisco Ditches Flip and $590 Million
darthcamaro writes "Remember the Flip? When Pure Digital Technology first came out with the device it was one of the hottest gadgets, providing users with an ultra-portable camcorder. Then Cisco came along and bought the Flip for $590 million in 2009. Now less than two years later, Cisco is throwing the money, 550 employees and the Flip out the door." Wired has an analysis of why Flip floundered. I hope this means I can find a AA-powered Flip UltraHD for $50 in a clearance bin.
I cannot be the only person here who thinks maybe that the company problem is that I was never aware of them?
Sit... Speak.... Shake.... Good Dog!
The article asserts that smart phones recorded just as well, making the Flip redundant. I go a step further and postulate that smartphones are frankly more convenient. I don't always grab my camcorder when I'm heading out the door just in case I see something awesome and film worthy on my way to work. But I absolutely have to have my cell phone. I do not leave home without it. And hey, if I happen to need to capture a few minutes of video on my phone, I have a 16 gig SSID chip in it AND I can just email the darn thing to myself and have it posted on YouTube or Twitter within ten minutes because of my data plan (something that even a wi-fi connected Flip phone couldn't do most places.)
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Probably. Unless you were planning on buying a few thousand of them a month. Many people were aware of them (as the were quite popular in their heyday). But if smart phones and digital cameras can also take movies that are just as good, why buy a dedicated, mediocre, video camera?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I was in the market for a small portable video camera when we had a baby on the way and was looking at the Flip. Then the iPhone 4 came out with HD recording and I got that instead and I'm glad I did, the video and photo's I shot with it are great for my purposes and it's always there in my pocket. They released a single purpose device just when multi-purpose ones were catching up on their area of expertise. Though break.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
As an owner of a flip, they only recorded; no pictures, no stop-motion available.
This is (slightly) offtopic, but I'll take the hit. It seems strange to me that digital still cameras and DSLR cameras don't offer webcam functions, at least I haven't found any that do. Thy typical have a much better sensor, lens and optical zoom than any dedicated webcam; can record high resolution video and connect as a USB device. So why is a USB webcam mode not incorporated?
I like how the Wired article calls its appearance "retro." I blame it on the click-wheel-inspired design. Man I hate the clickwheel, and always did. It's still polluting the design of non-Apple mp3 players to this day. Please, please give us real clickable buttons, far enough apart to operate through a jacket pocket.
Cisco bought TGV which made the best TCP stack for Win 3.x and which was making a fast stack for 95, then turned them into a cable modem lab... hmm, OK.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Flip's chances certainly weren't helped by the fact that, on the one hand, point and shoots with substantially more competent optics have been creeping down in price and creeping up in video capability, and on the other, smartphones(while substantially more expensive) are increasingly seen as a default, and so offer almost as good video recording for "free".
However, it really doesn't help that Cisco did surprisingly little with the company after they acquired it, and some of what they did do was questionable. The 'Slide' model was rather pitiful, their experiments in replacing the simple tried and true physical buttons with (lousy) touchscreens were failures, and they stuck with a price tag that was always hovering dangerously close to more capable devices. Other than a few incremental spec bumps there was almost no development of the product line for two years.
Flips were durable as hell. I gave one to my 10 year son a one and over the years it has twice spent 1+ weeks in the yard in rain and snow and both times it started right up no problem. Not bad and absolutely perfect for a kid into making movies.
The company was understandably miffed about having people going into their local drugstore and buying what would have been a $50-100 gadget for $30. Pretty neat devices. Very lightweight, and rugged as hell. At $30, perfect for strapping onto balloons, kites, and model rockets.
Miffed as they were about the disruption of the business model, they actually didn't get overly litigious about it. They didn't have much of a legal leg to stand on, so they basically asked really really nicely for people to stop, while updating their single-use devices to be a little harder to hack. (It took the community a couple of years to crack the newer firmware, and by that time, the devices, even at $30, were obsolescent.)
The "reusable video camcorder that offers 2-3 times the quality, a zoom lens, and 30 minutes of storage" version of the single-use device became the series known as the Flip. The Flip was an unencumbered version of the grocery store disposable units, featuring more storage and higher resolution, and even at retail prices, if you needed something rugged, lightweight, cheap to power, and still cheap enough that it's not the end of the world if the rocket gets stuck in a tree or your RC aircraft faceplants into the dirt, it was still pretty good value for the money.
My department got one of these as a "Free gift" from one of our vendors. I opened the box, had no idea what it was... it actually took me a good 10min to figure it out on the internet. Then I saw the price was $200 or so... My coworkers and I sat around staring at it wondering why on earth anyone would want one. It's NOT a camcorder, doesn't record video nearly as well, but costs about the same. It's not a smartphone... or even a PDA. The USB plug "Flipped" out giving the device its name... but it was part of the hardware. When you plugged it into the computer you had this giant device hanging off your USB port. If you had any sort of mass-produced workstation like we all had at work, it was nearly impossible to actually plug the stupid thing in because the plug wasn't flexible and our USB ports were about an 1/8" off our desks.
I'm not sure why CISCO bought them, I'm hoping for some codec or patent rights or something. Otherwise that product was a total failure.
I almost got my wife a Flip this past Christmas as a more convenient way to take videos of our 2yr old without having to haul around a full fledged camcorder. I ended up getting her the Kodak Playsport instead. It was less expensive (think I paid about $120), it is waterproof (major plus since little ones have a tendency to spill things), and the reviews were better. The wife loves it, and the 1080p videos are MUCH, MUCH better than what either of our phones can do (even on the highest setting). The only negative is sharing the videos. While they play just great on the device (connected to our TV over HDMI), most PCs struggle with the video due to the high resolution. I have convert the videos to lower resolution if we want to share them with family/friends.
The brilliance of this is that even if the Flip itself flops, Cisco still wins in the long run. As long as the Flip and the insane marketing hype surrounding it increased the popularity of HD video sharing on the web, people are going to need more routers in the network itself. I wonder who the ISPs and YouTubes of the world will be going to then...
Cisco never needed to sell the Flip as a physical product, they just needed to sell the idea of shooting LOTS of video and sharing it across the web. It seems like they've succeeded.
-twb
Okay, to me this just sounds like a business plan waiting to fail. If the marketing dept (or whatever dept that comes up with these ideas) should listen to their engineers only once, it would be to present the business plan to the engineers and ask "now, what would you do as a consumer?" If the engineers are worth anything, they will point out holes (like "not return it and just download the data myself") before the marketeers go off on a quixotic quest to try to dupe people out of their money. I mean, honestly, did they actually think people *liked* having to take their cameras/film back to the store just to get the photos? And pay for the "privilege"? There's two reasons one hour photos are virtually non-existent anymore, and they're called USB and digital cameras.
No, that's not understandable; sounds like a just another bunch of MBA types trying to get rich quick by holding people's data ransom.
Nathan's blog
Maybe you need to look around a little more. For example, look at the camcorder section of Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/photo/172421). Flip currently has the #2 best selling camcorder at Amazon, plus they hold another 6 spots in the top 20.
Apple seems to be making a pretty good go of it.
1/2 Billion is a LOT of router and switch sales to make up.
From Cisco's FAQ about the acquisition:
Q. How will Pure Digital’s products be sold and serviced?
A: For the time being, Pure Digital will continue to sell their product as they do today, on the web, via retail stores and through on-line retailers. Together Cisco and Pure Digital will work to expand sales opportunities for these exciting products.
Q. How will Cisco and Pure Digital customers be affected by the acquisition?
A: Cisco often acquires companies that can accelerate the development of a product, technology or platform. With Pure Digital, Cisco acquires consumer-friendly video products and technology, as well as a brand with mass-market appeal. Pure Digital customers will continue to receive the same great products and technology they are accustomed to receiving and will experience no negative impact in terms of features or service.
So much for truth in marketing.
Breakfast served all day!
The camera on the 9000 series phones is nothing like a flip phone. It's simply a USB web cam, that plugs directly into the phone. It's not HD, and it doesn't have very good optics. They didn't need to spend $500mil for that.
TFA missed a very important reason: no SD expansion slot.
Every single time I saw them on a store first thing I did was check if there was a way to expand memory with SD card. Nope?... well, ain't buying it then.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Why does Cisco buying them have anything to do with that? The product was a huge hit before they bought it. Cisco owning it didn't add anything.