Someone explain this to me, "flip" products to be killed

[MrBlah]

someone please explain this to me

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/13/industry-us-media-flip-idUSTRE73C02S20110413

#1 camcorder in the US, and they are gonna drop the whole line, wont even sell the line to another company

did someone suck all the o2 out of cisco's HQ?


(Reuters) - The popular Flip video camera -- the top-selling camcorder in the United States last year -- is getting the ax as part of a revamp at parent company Cisco Systems, CEO John Chambers said on Tuesday.

The move to kill a gadget that won rave reviews for jump-starting low-cost handheld video comes less than a week after Chambers said he had to make "tough decisions" about cutting spending on some product areas.

[wbeck257]

every cellphone now records hd -- my guess is cisco saw the writing on the wall.

[MrBlah]

they still sold more than any other company

I'm glad we got the kodak playsport week, I picked it on specs and reviews, but was sooo close to getting the flip, cisco totally killed that company and 500 employees

[TarzanMan]

Its not just the smartphones... adventure cameras like the GoPro and Contour offer better optics & more features in the other part of the market niche that flip cameras were intended for.

Then there is the fact that ~$200 ultracompact digital cameras now also record HD video onto high capacity SDHC memory cards.

Cisco read the writing on the wall. Every device their devices were competing with offered more use or more features.

[MrBlah]

I own both a gopro and a countour, both cannot do with the flip & kodak do

I looked at the same price point cameras, most of them do not do 1080p, or if they do, they wont focus while taking video, even my expensive S95 wont unless I run the hacked firmware

the main selling point for the flip type video recorders, is they just work, there's nothing to them, fixed lens, pick picture or video and click record, there's also some cheap pinhole cameras that are catching up

the #11 keychain camera is doing 720p and the video looks pretty good for 40 $

[SpeedGeek]

The group only made like 1/2 what Cisco expected them to last year (in profit, they DID turn a profit though), but yes, it's only a matter of a year or two before every handheld device out there will be recording in HD and doing it as well as Flip... and people are all about "all in 1" devices. Less crap to carry around. So, while Flip may have made Cisco money this past year, and might this year, it's time is short lived.

But yeah, stupid that they didn't just sell it off to somebody else who might want it... Get SOME money back for it vs what they paid to acquire it not many years ago...

[MrBlah]

lol the latest news, flip had an all new live streaming video product that was supposed to be released on the day they said we quit

[wallypiper]

Selling the most doesn't mean they were making money with it. I don't know the numbers, just saying.