The Flip camera is being discontinued

Today, Cisco Systems announced that it was dropping the Flip camcorder (article about this at the New York Times). They will not sell the product to another company nor will they spin it off into a separate company. They are just not going to make it anymore. This might seem like a strange subject for me to write about. After all, I know nothing about how large corporations work and what it takes to make a consumer product.

Cisco didn't create the Flip camera. They bought it from the original company (Pure Digital Technologies) that conceived the idea and brought it to market. The little video camera was a huge success. People loved it for its simplicity. One of its best features was that it didn't have too many features. It did just a few things but it did them well. It was reliable. It was easy to use. It just worked! Then the founders sold the company to Cisco which is known for its computer and Internet networking hardware. They knew nothing about this type of product but they had the money to spend and wanted to diversify their company. The creators of the product wanted to sell and they picked a good time. But now, this terrific little product will not be available anymore. Yes there are competitors  but this was the one the set the pace and led the competition. Here is a short article in Forbes magazine from a writer who will really miss the Flip camera.

From the articles I've read, most analysts thought that Cisco had made a mistake and this just proves it. If you read the New York Times article I linked to, you'll see a lot of reasons for why the Flip was being discontinued. The biggest "reason" was that smart phones could do everything the Flip could do and more. This is all wrong. Yes smart phones can take pictures and video but they cost a lot more (including monthly fees for connectivity), they are more valuable (so you can't just leave them laying around), they are more fragile, their batteries don't last as long - and I could go on and on. If Cisco or the original owner, Pure Digital Technologies, had really thought about it, they could have accentuated the strengths of the Flip to emphasize its superiority in certain areas over smart phones. For instance, the Flip would be a great surveillance camera. You wouldn't want to leave your smart phone laying around but you could do that with the inexpensive Flip (and it's smaller and easier to hide). Cisco, who supposedly know all about wireless networking, could have allowed the Flip to communicate with your wireless router or other Internet connection to let you keep tabs on your house - or your car - or your boat  - or even your bicycle. That was it's beauty. It was small and inexpensive. Another idea is that a lot of people would like to take time-lapse movies of certain things. The Flip could have been programmed to take a picture once every X minutes for a month or two. Then you would retrieve it and turn the pictures into a movie. You wouldn't want to do without your smart phone for that length of time but you could do that with a Flip. Or what about naturalists? They are always wanting to get pictures or video of animals that don't appear when you want them to. If the Flip had been augmented with a motion detection trigger, every wildlife biologist would have bought 10 of them! And these are just a few ideas that I came up with in a few minutes. If they had opened up the architecture of the Flip, a whole community of tinkerers would have grown up around it finding new and interesting ways to use a simple, inexpensive, reliable camcorder.

So, according to news reports, the bottom line is that Cisco just made a mistake in buying the Flip and were now admitting that. Yes, they were going to lose some money and some prestige but the Flip was a minuscule part of their business and they will recover just fine. But what about the 550 people who will be losing their jobs? What about the lost potential for a terrific product? And the Flip is still selling well, too. It's just not as big a money maker as Cisco would like. Yes, competitors can fill the void but that assumes the competitors know everything that the makers of the Flip did. Not likely. There will be lost knowledge and lost jobs. Our country doesn't need this kind of lazy, wasting of money and jobs right now.

[Update, April 15, In writing this blog, I hope to improve my writing. In the back of my mind, I think that some day I may try to write something and get paid for it. Then I realize that I'm not really a very good writer. Here is a link to David Pogue's blog post about the death of the Flip camera. He does a much better job of voicing the outrage at what has happened. I would have liked to have used this event to point out the larger, big problems we face when companies do stupid things like this. I didn't do that.]