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Comment by joebananas | Hacker News Reader

I don't see what's so tragic about the death of a consumer device that don't really sell.

From the linked article above:

"Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 bestselling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast."

I haven't seen any evidence that it didn't sell -- mostly, it appears to be the victim of entering Cisco's maw.

It's highly unlikely, at least to my mind, that Flip would grow to the point of taking over the world, but it's easy to imagine that it could've kept going for a long time if Cisco hadn't axed it.

It was the Market leader with 35% of the camcorder market.

Anyway, they killed the product in the most expensive way possible. If they wanted to save money they could have just cut the R&D budget, reduced production and quietly sold off their inventory. Instead they waited until a few weeks before introducing the product before killing it.

PS: As to why: They make far more money pretending that video conferencing is difficult. N flip phones + N laptops (which people already have) + wifi = 2, 3, or 4 way videoconferencing on the cheap.

"They make far more money pretending that video conferencing is difficult. N flip phones + N laptops (which people already have) + wifi = 2, 3, or 4 way videoconferencing on the cheap."

You're probably right. Maybe Cisco realized they were in an Innovator's Dilemma situation and they are just trying to delay the disruptive innovation, and its attendant lower margins, by buying the Flip and killing it.

The whole crux of the article is that it did sell, and that sales hence could not have been the motivating factor for cisco cutting it.

Do you also think we'd be better off without the many van Gogh paintings that didn't sell during his lifetime?

Well if they were mass-market prints that cost a lot of money to make and didn't sell well enough to recoup their losses, I certainly wouldn't complain too much when they were cancelled because they were unaffordable.

Terrible argument - Flip cameras aren't suddenly going to become valuable in 200 years. Or 50. Or 2.

I'm not trying to argue, I was simply trying to discover how much he thought popularity matters. If he figured van Gogh was unimportant, it'd be pointless to try to convince him that sometimes having companies doing interesting things is worthwhile.

(On another note, is Mac OS 9 valuable now? Will it become more valuable eventually? Should Apple just have closed shop since they had a small marketshare and a product that isn't valuable now? Could the lessons learned from the Newton have possibly been applied to make some other kind of consumer device?)

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