The Flip is Dead | Why the Media Got It Wrong

Yesterday Cisco announced that they will no longer be producing Flip cams.  We ended up with a lot of emails and tweets wondering how it would affect our My Flip Wedding product.  As far as we’re concerned, it is not a major deal for us at Storymix Media.

First, we have plenty of Flip cams at our disposal to satisfy customer orders.  Second, there are other alternatives from Sony and Kodak (see our comparison of the Flip and Kodak cameras) to name a few.  Plus, we’ll probably be able to buy a bunch of Flips at great prices now.  Maybe we’ll need to rename our product, but providing a great service to wedding couples is not dependent on its name.

I also want to share some of my thoughts on why using a standalone camera is still the best solution for DIY Wedding Video and rebut the typical media regurgitation of a bogus storyline.  In this case, the standard media line is that Cisco is killing the Flip because smartphones have eaten their market.

As far as most people are concerned, they didn’t even know that Cisco owned Flip.  Cisco purchased Flip in 2009 for $600 million as part of a strategy of expanding into consumer products.  But, to the average consumer, they only saw the Flip brand and its super easy-to-use cameras.  And just because Cisco was unable (or unwilling) to integrate Flip into its business in a way that made sense for them, does that mean you shouldn’t use a Flip (or Kodak or Sony) to record and preserve the moments and events for your life?

Why using a Flip is STILL the best choice for a DIY Wedding Video

1. Simplicity
– Do you want your guests trying to figure out which button(s) on their point-and-shoot camera to hit in order to begin recording the vows?
– Nothing says I love you like the sound of a smartphone ringing during the best man’s toast.

2. It will get used
– Having Flips sent to you and passed out to guests will guarantee that a lot of video is taken.
– Asking people to use their smartphone is a recipe for disaster.  Will they actually be taken out of their pockets?  Will they be checking Facebook instead of getting video?

3. You will get about 2 hours of video footage – per camera
– Each Flip has 8GB of memory which holds 2 hours of video
– How much space is on your friend’s phone?  Are you going to ask them to delete their photos and songs to make room?

4. Easy to actually get the video files
– The Flips get sent back to us and we download everything.  We’ll gladly take DVDs and thumb drives of video files with our Custom DIY Wedding Video product, but you need to do the work of getting the files.
– How much effort and time will it take to track down all your friends who shot videos on their phone?  Then you need to consolidate all of the files into one spot and edit it yourself (hope you have 50 hours of free time) or upload (good luck with 8GB of files) or mail it.

There are many good reasons why using a Flip is still the best option (my wedding case above being one example).  The big thing is that people record video for two main purposes: moments and events.  Moments are those everyday unexpected things that pop up and you want to have for posterity – your kids singing a funny song, your buddy blowing a huge bubble gum bubble.  Events are specific times that you want to remember and have forever – graduation, vacation, bar mitzvah.

For moments, video quality is not important.  The idea is to just capture what happened.  So, the device used isn’t all that important and you’ll use whatever you happen to have on hand.  For events, quality matters.  You’ll also prepare ahead of time to make sure you’re bringing the right equipment.  Hence, a standalone camera will be the best choice.  Of course there are lots of other considerations which will drive one to make the initial purchase of a video camera.  Sure, having one gadget that does a lot of different things is great.  But keep in mind that a Swiss Army knife has scissors, but I’d choose a nice sturdy pair of Fiskars for any real job if I have a choice.

Why did Cisco kill the Flip?

For those of you interested in why Cisco would kill the Flip off and not sell it, here are my thoughts which contrast with everything I’ve read from mainstream media.   They would have you believe that Flips were a great idea years ago, but now that smartphones can take video they are as necessary as TV antennas.  While there is some truth to the argument, the problem is that it is mere speculation.  Besides, why does Cisco shutting down Flip mean that standalone video cameras are a bad business or of no value?  Kodak certainly doesn’t agree.

So, if the Flip cam is still a good idea why would Cisco kill it and not sell it?  I’ll never know (and neither will most people unless they work in Cisco management), but my experience at a Fortune top 10 company gives me a few theories.

1. Big companies need to show growth
Apparently Cisco sold 2.5 million Flips last year. Sounds great to me too.  But, unless they have a huge profit margin and are providing a lot of free cash they could use, they need to have products whose sales are growing at a rapid pace.  This is what stockholders want.  And if you’ve seen Cisco’s stock price over the last 5 years, you’ll see investors haven’t been impressed.  Plus, the simplicity of the Flip may have led to its demise since there wasn’t a real need for people to buy new models.

2. Business focused companies stink at acquiring consumer companies
Cisco isn’t the first and won’t be the last big company to try and fail to buy their way into a new market.  When sales and revenues become flat, management often times is out of ideas and tries a new ‘strategy’.  One of the easy steps is to buy a bunch of companies in totally unrelated businesses which will magically create ‘synergies’ and ‘efficiencies’.  It doesn’t usually work and in this case Cisco obviously didn’t know how to make it work either.

3. Smoke screen to buy time
Executives who have not been getting results often like to sell off portions of the business to buy themselves time.  It is a way to ‘change directions’, which means nobody wants to remove the guy at the top when everything is in turmoil.

4. Internal politics
Maybe the executive who pushed to buy Flip (and/or their other consumer businesses) is no longer around and can’t defend why $600 million wasn’t a waste of money.  Perhaps someone got promoted to a new position of authority who opposed the purchase originally and now can ‘prove’ they were right by killing it off.  We may never know what has gone on inside the boardrooms at Cisco

5. Companies are dumb
Running a company doesn’t mean you are smart.  And journalists and pundits automatically declaring smartphones the ‘winners’ in a video war nobody knew existed are just as clueless.  Good products get killed all the time.  Bad products get made too (I’m looking at you Microsoft.  Even Apple made the Pippin, remember that?).  Ford Motor Co. lost $2 billion dollars trading palladium futures about 10 years ago.

Well, that was certainly a long post.  What’s it all mean?  As far as why Cisco is killing the Flip we may never know the real story.  But for your wedding, rest assured the Storymix Media and My Flip Wedding are ready and at your service.