It isn’t true at all that nobody’s buying Flip camcorders. So far, seven million people have bought them…Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 best-selling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast…
[Flip] reaped the rewards that come from selling to a megalithic corporation like Cisco. Yes, there was plenty of money to go around, but also the risk that always comes when you sell to a bigger company: that they’ll chop you up and sell off your parts.
Or, in Cisco’s case, much worse: chop you up and leave you for dead.
—
David Pogue in The Tragic Death of the Flip
David Pogue in The Tragic Death of the Flip
SC
on 22 Apr 11People need to stop bitching about acquiring companies changing the product/end-of-life’ing things.
Flip was sold for $600 million, at this point – it just sounds like mega-millionaires whining.
ambrosen
on 22 Apr 11SC, if the people complaining were the people who ran Flip, and if they were complaining about money, then the price of acquisition would be up for criticism, but I think they still retain the right to complain about how the property was treated. As it’s the customers who want the product kept in development, then they have every right to complain.
ML
on 22 Apr 11SC, this quote isn’t about Flip’s founders complaining (though maybe that’s going on too). This is from the customer’s perspective. David Pogue loves the Flip camera. He’s sad about its demise. That’s why he’s pointing out the weirdness of seeing a product that people love and is still very popular get eliminated.
JD
on 22 Apr 11I thought it was a shame too. I like the Flip.
Luther
on 22 Apr 11If it had a better zoom, the flip would be a fantastic device. With it’s current zoom, or lack of, it’s still a great device for many applications.
BH
on 22 Apr 11It is weird to kill the Flip if it’s still selling.
Personally, I don’t see the point of buying a Flip. I recently got a point and shoot that also does 720p hd video. It was cheaper than the Flip and better in almost every conceivable way. It can take still pictures and record video. It has an optical zoom. I can put whatever memory card I want in it.
Maybe Cisco could see that there’s so many products on the market that are much better and cheaper than the Flip, and eventually people would figure that out. Although some people haven’t figured it out yet.
TJ
on 22 Apr 11It is a shame! Cisco f’d up.
Dan Jaffe
on 22 Apr 11It’s a hard lesson to learn that once your company/baby is acquired it’s not yours any more.
It would be interesting to see the numbers and see what Cisco gained. Was there some essential technology that Flip had that they either needed to acquire or protect themselves against another company acquiring?
Dave Goulden
on 22 Apr 11@Dan Jaffee, the lesson is more like as soon as you take in large amounts of financing, then it’s not your baby any more.
The deal the founders made with investors was to get them a return and then they went and delivered on that promise.
I’m not saying that this is the preferred path, but it’s important to recognize when a company “changes hands”.
nick campbell
on 23 Apr 11@Dan Jaffee How the Flip process video quality and compressed it was probably of great interest to Cisco since they needed something a little better for their video conferencing business. Maybe also the fact that the Flip transfered that quality video over USB quite quickly. I’m not sure, but there were a lot of great technology pieces to the equation that Cisco would have wanted to improve other businesses they ran.
Plus when you know you aren’t a consumer product company and you don’t want other people using the technology (or would rather sell the licence) killing off the company makes sense since all the property of it is part of Cisco anyway.
Andrew
on 23 Apr 11I think we need to stop paying attention to the 590 million, as ML said, the real issue seems to be that this is a ridiculously popular product (my wife has one and loves it), unless they are losing money per unit (a possibility) why would they be so quick to cut the cord on this thing?
Hm
on 23 Apr 11What if the move to ‘kill’ flip is just a PR move by cisco in order to attract buyers for a divestment of the unit?
Brent Weaver
on 24 Apr 11Kind of funny, just bought one of the new ones to compliment our new video blog so I could carry around an HD cam in my pocket. Their first marketing email after they get my email address is to tell me they are closing…what a shame.
Hamranhansenhansen
on 25 Apr 11The problem with this story is you can easily make it sound like the Flip is thriving, when it is not. “But they sold 7 million!” and “they have 21% of the US camcorder market!” Well, Apple sell more HD camcorder iPods in a single quarter than all the Flips ever sold, and twice as many HD camcorder iPhones per quarter than all the Flips ever sold, and they are expected to sell more HD camcorder iPads per quarter this year than all the Flips ever sold. And those devices have a $5 video editing app and YouTube upload, which out-conveniences the little flip-out USB on the Flip by far. Then you add in other brands of smartphone, and all the point-and-shoot and SLR cameras that capture video now, and you see that most camcorders are not in fact part of the camcorder market. Somebody has the largest share of the CD player market, but they are not dominating music playback.
What’s worse for Cisco is that the people who bought Flips are very much the same people who bought all these other devices, and their Flip is in a drawer and they won’t be buying another Flip. The Flip may have 25% better quality than their iPhone camcorder, but a CD has 25% more quality than MP3/MP4 and that didn’t stop iPod. And iPhone beat out a Canon SLR as the most popular camera on Flickr, and that certainly wasn’t due to better photo quality, it was about always having the device with you and about instant sharing via networks. The Flip culture moved to the iPhone. Even the murals moved onto iPhone cases.
Cisco apparently thought Flip was the next iPod, but it was actually the next thing the iPod killed. Cisco bought it when it was already past its prime, just like Adobe with Flash. At least Cisco is not embarrassing itself by hanging on too long, or intertwining their other products with Flip and dragging them down, again, like Adobe with Flash. Cisco was only in the Flip business to get more video onto networks and sell more routers, and they still get to sell routers if people are putting video from phones on there.
Hang on to your Flips, though. They are a great Hipster accessory, for carrying ironically.
SC
on 25 Apr 11@Hamranhansenhansen
EXACTLY!
Great comment.
This discussion is closed.