"And I just can’t figure out why people like this thing." http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/05/the-flip-v-my-cheap-canon-camera-flip-loses-across-the-board/
That single sentence discredits quite a few things he says for me since it's really simple why people like it. It's simple! Duh!
On top of that, what's with all the Arrington bashing lately? Some of his stuff is good and some is questionable. If you disagree with him, great, just put some meat into the argument. This just seems like you're going out of your way to post something negative. If you want to lay out your arguments for the "quite a few things", that could lead to an interesting thread, but I just don't get what you were expecting to achieve by posting this.
I tried to start a discussion instead, based on the fact that he doesn't "get" the Flip. He's a guy that puts himself out there and implies that his opinion is better than others.
Which gets to my point: How can he be soooo wrong here? He acknowledges that people LOVE the flip, he acknowledges that they've been "harsh" (and really, wrong) on the flip in the past, and he goes on to make a list of all the reasons why it's wrong.
And it's the same reasons that people use against the iPod, iPhone, Basecamp, and lots of other really really good products.
Lets go through them:
1. "doesn’t play nice with Macs" - Fair point. Could be better, but macs are what, 5% of the market. And I'm posting from a mac.
2. "editing video requires a number of extra steps". That doesn't even mean anything to me. Have you tried to capture video from a camera (point and shoot or video)? The Flip's individual files are by far easier than trying to capture from a tape.
3. "Flip insists on encoding video in a proprietary format that iMovie can’t handle directly". They said the same thing about aac and the iPod. People don't care.
4. 99.9% of people DON'T EDIT VIDEO. He's bashing a great product on a non-issue. Has he never seen youtube? View the "most recent" posted videos, not all the ones on the front page, and there's billions of 12 second clips of people goofing off.
5. MA then goes to a laundry list of features that some random camera does better than the flip. Again, was he not around when the iPod or iPhone came out? It's the interface stupid, people don't care about features. No one gives a flying leap about any of that. They want to know how much video it holds, and that they press a red button and a trash can, and a play button. Oh, and they don't have to buy more cards, and they don't have to buy some stupid adapter for said cards, and there's no stupid card to lose with all your video on it.
6. "But my Canon is pretty darn easy to use, too". Please read "The Paradox of Choice". Does your cannon have more than 3 buttons?
7. "There is no way I’m going to drag two devices around when I only need one: The Flip loses." Hi. iPod. Bye.
8. "More and more mobile phones take video now, too, and can use wifi or cell connectivity to stream the footage to the Internet." Wow. Just wow. Why would anyone who cares about streaming footage directly to the internet care about the flip? Good lord. This is like saying, "No one will ever buy a VW Beetle because they can't go 200 mph." Good lord, how wrong can you be?
9. And now for the best part: " That means Flip is getting hit from three competitive directions: mobile phones on the low end, decent camcorders on the high end, and tens of millions of everyday digital cameras that outperform it on video." Mike, have you considered there is room in the market for more than 1 type of product? That no video camera needs to rule them all. That the Flip is in no way targeted at you? And that you don't represent the target market in any way?
So why does this discredit him in "quite a few things"? This should be his forte. All the time he says he rejects talking about companies because they have "bad products" (like the guy that broke into his house this week). As someone else points out about Ning, he's constantly spouting off his (sometimes) terrible opinion, and then touting how much he knows about this stuff and how influential he is (see his back patting on the TC40 stuff). So, as I said in the title, this is precisely "Why you should take everything Mike Arrington says with a grain of salt."
So I haven’t actually tried out the new Flip Mino. But I’ve spoken with people who have, and I used the Flip Ultra, which launched late last year, for a while before abandoning it. And I just can’t figure out why people like this thing.
So you're reviewing something you've never used? That's credible.
I assume the people he's "spoken with" here are the same people he's spoken with about twitter being slow because of Rails. I'm starting to think that Arrington has a lot of "imaginary friends."
I will begin to lose respect for him when a company he invest his money in goes on stage at TechCrunch 50.
I will definitely lose all respect for him if one of the start ups he invests in wins TechCrunch50. At some Point he needs to decide if he is his own PR firm or a third party commentator.