The Flip: No Longer Good Enough?
Yesterday Cisco killed off the much-beloved Flip video camera. It was an unglamorous end for a cool device that just few years earlier shocked us all by coming to dominate the video camera market, utterly routing established players like Sony and Canon. The Flip’s success showed how simple, easy-to-use products can end up trouncing feature-rich, high-fidelity competitors. In a 2009 Wired article, I used the Flip as one of the main examples of what I call The Good Enough Revolution.
So what happened? Well, Cisco happened. When I was writing The Good Enough Revolution, Cisco had just purchased Pure Digital Technologies, the inventor of the Flip, as part of a new push into consumer products. I believe that, at the time, Cisco figured the Flip was a good gizmo for the company to own because it encouraged people to put video on the Web. And having more high-bandwidth things like video bouncing around the Web is simply good for Cisco, which makes some of the hardware that runs the Web.
Flash forward a few years, though, and suddenly the Flip’s business isn’t as breathtaking as it was back in 2009 (though I still haven’t seen any actual numbers). The reason—smart phones now all take video, eating into the Flip’s business. So why should a maker of router and switches keep making a video camera with declining market share? Cisco was just blindsided by the rapidly changing world of technology. Nothing they could do, right?
Wrong. The real problem is that Cisco clearly never understood what made the Flip great. The Flip succeeded because it was, as I said, Good Enough. It sacrificed video quality and advanced features (heck, it even sacrificed basic features like zoom) for the sake of being dead simple to use. And this let people get video onto the Web faster and easier than they could with any other camera. This is what made the Flip blow past all its competitors. But in the hands of Cisco, the secret to Flip’s success got lost. I bought a Flip Mino back in 2009, and happened to get a new one last Christmas. About the only thing that had changed in the intervening two years was that the video quality had gotten better. A lot better. The frames were smoother, the color richer. But the Flip was never about video quality. It was about accessibility.
When I interviewed Pure Digital’s Simon Fleming-Wood back in 2009, he understood the value of the Flip intuitively. I asked what was next for the Flip—how the company could improve its product—and he didn’t mention video quality at all. He talked about how the Flip might make it even easier for users to shoot and share video. His main focus to this end was connectivity. He wanted to give the Flip the ability to upload video on the fly—from anywhere —so you could share footage on the Web (via Facebook, YouTube, etc) instantly. This would likely require Wi-Fi or cell connectivity. But the point is, he wanted the Flip to continue to find ways of making video more accessible. He even raised the idea that the Flip might have to further sacrifice video quality to make this happen.
Instead though, what changed about the Flip was video quality. In fact, the video got so much better that my computer now chokes on Flip clips because they have high bit-rates. This makes it harder to import, harder to edit, and harder to upload and share. It makes video less accessible. But, as we now know, another company did come along and make video more accessible in the way Simon Fleming-Wood envisioned: Apple. The iPhone now shoots video, and, because it is attached to a data network, it let’s you post clips instantly. The video may not be as good as the footage from the new Flip models, but that simply does not matter. The iPhone’s video is (yup) Good Enough.
I hope that when other gadget makers look at story of the Flip, they see how Pure Digital got it right, and Cisco then got it wrong. In the age of connectivity accessibility is the driving quality to strive for: not features and fidelity.
