Cisco has recently announced that they will cease in production and distribution of their popular small-form camcorder the Flip. The company which began Flip sold out to Cisco in 2009, but not before selling two million of their pocket-sized products. The start-up was a techie Cinderella story, but what went wrong?
Cisco has been mum on the reasons they decided to shut down the branch even though the Flip was and is leading the camcorder market and spawned many lookalikes when it debuted. Many have speculated that the decision was made for reasons which include competition from many sources: lookalikes, other camcorder handhelds which have adopted easier-to-use formats, and (insert dramatic music here) the smartphone.
What can’t the smartphone do? And when I say that I mean what industry can’t the smartphone imitate and later destroy? And to ask one more rhetorical question, what are gadget companies to do?
There are a few options here that gadget companies could follow, all which are a bit extreme: fail, create something better than a smartphone, create the best smartphone available, or make your products more alluring to consumers than smartphones.
Easier said than done, of course, but there is a reason Flip was a Cinderella story. The gadget industry is slowly sinking and morphing into one giant multi-task tool, one conglomeration of every application anyone can think of. This leaves no room for individuals; in fact it’s almost like an authoritarian regime for tech toys.
The moral of this fairytale is that the Flip was created on the cusp of the smartphone take over. Any later it would never have worked, any sooner and it could’ve been more of a success (but hindsight’s 20/20). Smartphones are taking over the tech industry and fast. Even if Cisco did not shut down Flip due to lack of sales from smartphone competition, my advice to all gadget developers remains the same:
Create an app for the iPhone, create something better than the iPhone, or don’t create at all. Labors of love will be lost, so if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
