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Comment by giarc | Hacker News Reader

I think GoPro suffers from two problems.

1. Many people buy these camera's that never use them, or use them a few times but realize editing videos takes longer than they hoped it would. So after a while of non use, they sell the camera.

2. They built a good product, one that lasts and is therefore good for the used market. People are comfortable buying a used GoPro because they know it's rugged and well built.

So GoPro's have a good resale value and therefore many people that might normally buy a new one, instead turn to the used market which doesn't help GoPro at all.

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If only they made crappier products that break more often, at least then their stock shareholders would think it's a good company. This exemplifies everything that's wrong with capitalism and planned obsolescence.

In what way do you think that strategy is an inescapable consequence of capitalism?

Capitalism isn't a bad idea, it just needs proper regulation. What we have is an unregulated mess which gives both stupid and unscrupulous execs the advantage.

That doesn't answer my question, at all. What is it about capitalism that makes the strategy you describe a) inevitable, and b) worthy of regulation (since you brought that up)?

Also, I disagree that the modern economy is unregulated. Quite the contrary, in fact. And it's regulation, bailouts and crony capitalism that protect companies who make awful products.

What is it about capitalism that makes the strategy you describe a) inevitable, and b) worthy of regulation (since you brought that up)?

The profit motive covers (a).

No, it doesn't. Consumers value products that last a long time.

This is a big reason Apple is the world's largest computer computer company despite charging more for the same transistor counts. People are actually willing to pay a huge premium for reliable stuff that they don't have to junk after a year. The market gets it right.

It doesn't cover why it would be an inescapable consequence.

A company that built lasting products of high quality wouldn't earn profits? Hmmmmmm[0]

[0] https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAAPL&fstype=ii&ei=...

haha is this a joke? Apple basically forces you to upgrade your phone every two years, by releasing a mandatory OS update that makes older phones slow as dirt.

I'm talking about my mom's 1957 Ford pickup that still runs great today. I'm talking about the Ostrisizer can opener from the 1970s that my family still uses in their kitchen. 5 years lifetime for a $800 product is not "built to last".

A 1957 Ford pickup is going to be an absolute deathtrap in an accident. I'm not sure that's a great example.

Not quite that exact combo, but you get the idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U

I had my MacBook Pro for 6 years before I upgraded, and didn't really need to. Are there many better examples within the computer / smartphone industry than Apple? Capitalism allows $1000 to buy progressively more powerful computers year after year.

Oh but you're talking about pickup trucks and can-openers. Oh ok my bad.

Were those created by socialist / communist economies now?

What are we even talking about here? Did capitalist economies develop these things or not? Does the profit motive not motivate the auto company and can opener company to produce a better product?

We're not talking about capitalism vs. communism. We're talking about capitalism vs. consumerism, aka Planned Obsolescence.

Capitalism _could_ produce products (even high-tech products like phones) that last for longer than 2 years (e.g. swappable chips/boards/screens, etc), but it doesn't, because the rapid, constant growth demanded by investors is antithetical to making products that are built to last.

1957 Fords were made in a capitalist society under less regulations than todays cars. Cold War era Trabants, Skodas or Ladas that were made under a socialist economy were neither as durable nor as desirable as those capitalist cars made in the West.

Nothing in the profit motive prohibits Apple's success, no. Apple certainly pays attention to its margins and how to increase them, it's just that they're not afraid to do it with price. However, and this can't be the first time you've seen this, but brands and their products are routinely downgraded in quality over time, particularly after acquisitions. Have you seen a Bell & Howell product line lately?[1] See also: Converse Chuck Taylor and Doc Marten shoes.

1. http://bellandhowell.com/

Or.. its just a reflection of the market they're in. Understanding how much innovation opportunity is left in a market/category is a huge part of identifying whether you should continue to invest there or elsewhere.

It's not really about "crappier products that break more often." It's about not giving people compelling reasons to buy upgraded versions or not expanding into new product areas (as they've just recently done with their drone). And, yes, if you're a company with shareholders, you can't get away with selling a product and then have your sales dwindle when you don't follow up with anything people want to buy.

Leica cameras have always been quality products and that didn't hurt them at all. A Leica will last forever.

Leica is privately owned, which does make it easier to choose less growth. As a public company you need to grow or return enough steady dividends to make it worthwhile for people to keep their money invested in you.

But Leica as a company would have never reached the valuation Gopro enjoyed (and now suffers from, we would not have this conversation if the Gopro brand had not inspired unrealistic expectations)

Or maybe they shouldnt build the company around one product. If they made a crappy product, someone else would make a better one, and people would buy that one.

"This hypothetical scenario that I just made up and isn't what's actually happening here is everything wrong with capitalism."

That's the second half of the equation. The first half was "video editing is harder than they hoped so they sell it". Maybe focus on making the product EVEN better (vs worse) by identifying how to make the process after the video is shot better. Aka don't ruin resale value, instead focus on WHY people are reselling them and fix that. Maybe make an iMovie style tool for common go pro uses.

GoPro's market segment requires toughness and reliability. It's the central plank in their offering. They'd never have built their name if they made shoddy stuff.

It's not them, if their product broke, someone else in China would have made a better one.

I think consumer video in the last 10 years went from expensive and ok quality to dirt cheap and professional quality. The same thing that happened to audio happened to video. Now all of that GoPro tech is hitting smart phones and ultra cheap Chinese knock offs.. The whole consumer electronics space has been eaten by the smartphone.

Same thing is happening to Apple. The cutting edge is slowing down or is too good already and everything is starting to get super cheap and commoditized. It's hard for premium brands to get an edge.

I'm not convinced that GoPro is unusually affected by #2 but resale values seem relatively strong, so maybe to some degree.

There's also more competition.

I'm inclined to think point 1 is significant though. This seems like one of those products/product categories that was a hot ticket for a while. Then most people who bought them realized that they didn't actually jump off cliffs and, after the 10th time, the video of them going down an intermediate ski run was sorta boring and not really worth the trouble to make. So, like many fads, it didn't go away but it wasn't a must-have gadget for the would-be daredevil (or those who wanted to think of themselves in those terms).

GoPro 2 was rock-solid, but 3 and 4 had huge quality problems. Terrible customer service as well. I used to like GoPro, but since the GoPro 2 they've completely soured me. I don't know if the GoPro 5 is any better, but the Amazon reviews are terrible.

The wifi on gopro 3 is spotty at best. I wouldn't put GoPRo in the "quality" camera department, since it's essentially just another CMOS sensor with accessories.

I've used a Hero 4 and bought the Hero 5. The 5 is better IMO.

The 5 also turned out to be a little cheaper for my use case than the 4.

Re: Video editing, whoever figures out how to make that _super easy_ is going to make a TON of money.

You mean iMovie? How can it get easier than "drag and drop your video, hit share button"

That's not editing. iMovie is only easy if you don't actually edit your videos--arrange, slice, add music and text, etc. Video editing is slow and difficult.

I was thinking about the Snapchat glasses, which I initially regarded as stupid. But when I considered the intimidation factor associated with video editing, it dawned on me that Snapchat's 10 second time constraint effectively forces users to shoot video that is super easy for the masses to edit, arrange, share and aggregate, and within a universally defined set of constraints. So I think snapchat glasses could be huge success. They have a simple, low tech solution for the 'editing video for presentation is hard' problem, which isn't an immediately obvious problem, but it's critical.

Even though the best Viners out there make amazing films with Tarentino-level editing in only 6 seconds.

Editing is an art - sure you can automate it, but until we have strong AI it's not going to be a substitute for a talented editor.

I agree. And the snapchat glasses bring the fundamentals of editing down to the level of fingerpainting, which effectively democratizes it. No matter how skilled an editor you are, if you're publishing to Snap, you're on the same playing field as any 14 year old doing the same thing.

A little bit of well-design AI would be huge in this space. Imagine you import your raw footage and a rough cut with typical shot selections for your content and pacing is already arranged for you...just tweak from there.

I don't know what you call that, "dropping a steaming binary turd on your friends"? I dunno, but "editing" it is not.

I've got literal hours of video of some dirt road in the Alaska tundra. No one wants to watch that, I've got to whittle it down to the highlight and parts that folks might enjoy, like the mountain goats in the middle of a blind corner or the moose running across the road. And that is time-intensive; literal hours for fifteen minutes of something I'd share with people. Not just finding the interesting parts, but captions and titles, and some kind of soundtrack, it all adds up to non-trivial amounts of time. One could just hit the "share" button, but no one's going to watch more than 30 seconds of it.

One also quickly learns that from the camera's POV a lot of stuff looks alike. Our recent trip down the Icefields Highway in British Columbia looks like any of a hundred mountain roads when viewed through the lens of a camera. Makes me kind of wonder why I bother.

When you've had to deal with the hours-of-video problem, you learn to be much more selective for when to start recording, and for how long to record. But even with that, and end even when you've learned the tricks of your editing software, and when you have given up the inner perfectionist, in my experience each minute of the final (amateur!) production still takes 10-100x more time to put together.

Automated editing solutions would help, but compared to editing by hand, I'd say they would compare same way as Instagram filters compare to a photographer/retoucher working in Lightroom/Photoshop.

I'd say they would compare same way as Instagram filters compare to a photographer/retoucher working in Lightroom/Photoshop.

So... they would propel you and your company into the stratosphere of success? :)

Maybe not iMovie, but I've been having great fun with the 'Memories' feature in iOS 10. I used it to make a 4min video of our recent family holiday in 30min on the plane. - Imported photos from our waterproof camera (compact-style, not GoPro. Cheaper than GoPro!) via the Apple Camera Connector. - Used mainly photos from the iPhone, but because I have Live Photos turned on, it was the 6-sec video that got put into the final clip instead of just the still.

I agree with your premise; the hard part is definitely finding the interesting bits. Actually putting them together is easy after that. There's some good stuff happening with "exciting moment detection" based on other sensors; like peak heart-rate and speed if you record those on Garmin.

this. i want to be able to edit pro-looking video on my phone with the same ease that i can stitch multiple photos together in Instagram's Layout app

Vee for Video on iOS is pretty nice for quickly editing and publishing videos. Supports all the common edits and is pretty intuitive.

Not affiliated, just a happy user.

there are a few orgs working on this using AI/Machine learning on the b2b side for news/journalism orgs, no offerings for general users yet but it's on the horizon for sure.

The TomTom Bandit is an attempt to do that. The editing app is pretty decent, and it uses motion sensors and GPS on the camera to auto-detect interesting highlights in the video. (disclaimer: I do work there, but not on that team)

Can't find the link right now but I think Microsoft is working on auto-cut software that automatically detects interesting moments in a video and stitches them together?

So GoPro's have a good resale value and therefore many people that might normally buy a new one, instead turn to the used market which doesn't help GoPro at all.

That's not necessarily true. The counterargument is that having a good resale value allows you to charge more for your new sales because of the added value.

That counterargument only flies when sellers are repeatedly selling to get yet another upgrade. First time buyers rarely think about resale value.

But giarc's point wasn't so much about resale value (despite his claims of the opposite), it was about an active second hand market due to (1) confused first time buyers and (2) a reputation of ruggedness.

It basically boils down to: more people buy gopros than there are people with a real usr car for them, this is why the second hand market exaggerates market saturation effects more than usual.

I think you don't understand the point which I consider to be whether GoPro's profits are helped or hurt by a robust market for their used products.

Whether or not GoPro generates more total sales as a result of their products' value in the used market, they are able to charge a higher price for new sales because of it.

It may be that the higher price does not offset sales competition from used products, but that is another question.

>People are comfortable buying a used GoPro because they know it's rugged and well built.

My GoPro 2 is still going quite strong, despite having hit the asphalt on at last two occasions at high speed (well, high for a bicycle) due to their plastic mounts breaking. I switched to a third-party, metal mount, and haven't looked back.

So perhaps the issue is that they made a good product that never needs replacing. Is 4K recording a large enough draw? What is the saturation of 4K TVs so far? Could all contribute.

Equally a strong resale market should encourage people to try them out because the risk factor is relatively low. Don’t get on with it / use it? Sell it on & only have to eat a relatively small proportion of the price you paid.

I belong to group 1 – but because of the low battery endurance of the newer models. And the touch GUI and the apps aren't that great either. If I don't need a rugged camera, I can directly use my iPhone.

Shred Video (http://shredvideo.com/) is trying to solve the editing problem.

Phenomenal!

Do you know of anything similar that is available for Android?

Plus, the whole filming yourself riding your bike or skiing thing is a fad that people grow tired of.

My Facebook page hit peak GoPro video 3 years ago.

I think people have just figured out that competitors offer much more value.

> They built a good product, one that lasts and is therefore good for the used market.

They should sell like apple - "we are launching best ever go pro, 67% brighter than any other go pro" lol

Now you need 3 dongles to get your movie out of the camera

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