"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.
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?)
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.
They really said that? That's just utterly delusional in a Wired on push as the future stylee.
Anyways, to get at that real world data they crave, they're gonna need tons of users, and if they ever get even one tenth of a percent of what Google has I'd be shocked.
It's moves like this that comes back and bites companies in the ass. Now they're gonna be stuck playing keep up with Android for the foreseeable future. And when you're playing catchup, you're probably not gonna have the time to be the leader.
So now "BlackBerry tablet apps" will be based on (I might have gotten a few of these wrong) Flash/Air, HTML, old BlackBerry OS, new BlackBerry OS, and [non-tablet] Android? And maybe Java? Interesting to see someone take the exact opposite route from Apple, who's obsessed with "owning" the app/development environment for their systems.
Sure, technically they've solved the problem of not having any apps... but I bet they've just shifted the problem to not having any good apps. That might be an even worse problem to have.
Sounds like a test/security nightmare, too.
What happens when a BB game plays fine until the (very popular) Android tool in the background messes it all up?
>Maybe it is, but you really can't go around claiming openness when you don't provide it.
How does "closed Honeycomb" reflect on any of the code that you previously would have considered "open"?
Before someone commits code to an open-source project, that code isn't available. No one would claim that the existence of that unavailable code says anything about the openness of the available code. And that wouldn't change if the unavailable code was shared with some of the author's friends.
What if the author in your example and his friends shipped the unavailable code as a consumer product and called it Android Smart Tablet?
They've been making a lot of noise for years about Android the open source software stack for mobile devices. Now they
're releasing mobile devices, calling it Android, basing it on Android, and keeping the source to themselves; Weak.
> What if the author in your example and his friends shipped the unavailable code as a consumer product and called it Android Smart Tablet?
Would you have not complained if they had called it "Banana" instead? Or, would you have complained when they open-sourced Banana because it was really Android.
They open-sourced a huge amount of code and you're complaining because they didn't open-source some other code because that other code has the same name?
The concept of openness is not black or white. There are many shades of grey, and certainly wrt mobile OSs, Android is more open than WP7, iOS, RIM, or WebOS. Just like there are differences between FOSS licenses (e.g. BSD vs GPL). They have to contend with the wishes of the carriers and hardware mfgs, not just developers, which can be quite difficult to balance.
Yes, Android's conception of openness is the kind where you get to advertise how moral you are and how dastardly the competition is, not the kind where you have to compromise on difficult business decisions.
So you disagree that Google/Android is more open than any of the other platforms?
I've never understood Google's 'openness' argument as a moral one. I always took it to mean that I can do whatever I want with my hardware, including side-loading software at various levels of the stack. This has held mostly true.
I'm seeing two kinds of attacks on Google/Android's openness when this kind of thing happens. The first is from F/OSS advocates that feel betrayed and manipulated by Google's use/misuse of F/OSS terms, which is pretty understandable to me as Google's handling of its software seems to be very different from traditional F/OSS.
The other is from Apple advocates trying to score cheap gotcha/schadenfreude points. Your comment is the second kind.
Google has been pushing the 'open' line heavily since Android launched. They've benefitted from endlessly positive PR; they deserve to be called on it when they choose profits over principle. That seems to be a lot these days.
> I can do whatever I want with my hardware
All handset manufacturers lock down the firmware. You can download the source, but you can't do anything without hacking the phone. If that's 'open', then by unlocking my iPhone I can render it just as 'open'. Now you can't even download the source. As for side-loading, the second-largest mobile provider in the US doesn't let you do it at all. How is Android open if Google never calls out the gatekeepers as they strip away the openness?
The only substantial way Android can even claim to be 'open' is the lack of editorial control over the software installed on Android phones. Of course, Skyhook probably has something to say about that too.
As for Apple, they do plenty of things I don't like. But fundamentally they're just a consumer electronics company turning out gadgets with few political implications.
Apple isn't the world's largest advertising company, running the world's largest private information gathering system. Apple isn't the go-to company when Obama wants advice on tech issues. Apple hasn't enabled censorship in China. Apple hasn't supported net neutrality when it suited their needs, then yanked the rug away when it didn't.
Google is all of those things - and their reputation as the universal love child, reflexively defended by legions of fans based on their commitment to principles like 'not being evil' and 'openness', enables them to act without regard to those principles.
I disagree that the PR has been "endlessly positive;" I do think they should be called out when they deserve it, and I think some of the points that you point out qualify. I don't think delaying the release of Honeycomb really qualifies, but that's debatable.
The handset manufacturers/carriers do lock down the software. But that's not Google, that's the manufacturers/carriers. When Google is involved (with their flagship devices like the G1 and Nexus devices) the hardware is not locked down at all.
I think one of the problems with what you're saying is the conflation of specific hardware, Android, and Google Experience Android. Anyone can take open source Android and put it on any hardware they manufacture. That's open. Some manufacturers can negotiate with Google to put Google Experience Android on their hardware. That's less open, but more open than most/all other platforms. Skyhook can make a deal with anyone making non-Google Experience Android devices they want to. Google Experience Devices still enjoy almost complete freedom in the Android Market, as well as openly distributed APKs (excepting ATT devices).
RE Apple and political implications: I disagree with you. Their editorial oversight and the heavy-handed and arbitrary way that they exercise it is political control.
RE Apple and censorship: Apple doesn't enable censorship in China. They actively engage in censorship everywhere (through the App Store). I'm sure if Apple had occasion to enable censorship in China, they'd (prudently) do so. (As an aside, Apple has other issues in China.)
I'll admit I do like Google and have a warm and fuzzy feeling about them. But I think it's deserved. Google has done some amazing things, some (like the release of Android source) unequivocally open.
That said, I do think Google makes some pragmatic decisions sometimes that are compromises of their professed principles. And that does make me angry. I don't reflexively defend those decisions. I do hope that they are pragmatic decisions taken with a long-term view (e.g. working with carriers/manufacturers until Android and specifically Google Experience Android is a sufficient industry power that they can force the industry to open up and allow software freedom).
Again, delaying the release of source code to me does not qualify as a breach of principle, and the criticisms thereof strike me as reflexive, and mostly in the two ways I described above.
Seems to me that the important part of Android openness was the ability to sideload and run competing app stores.
It's great that the OS source was also open, but it seems like this has only a very indirect impact on end users and app developers, unlike app store policies.
chuckle This is the exact same thread I used to see years ago, except it was the startup time of vi vs. emacs. Being an emacs guy, I would generally remark something like, "yeah, I remember the ONE time a few months ago I started emacs when the sparc had to be rebooted for new memory."
I think that supports his point. PCs have better controls and (high end ones have) better graphics than consoles. Despite this, more games are sold for consoles, and developers target them.
The same effect can occur for iOS devices - and their graphics will get better each year (9 times faster this year...)
Perhaps you guys should have taken this as a sign that Vimeo relys way too much on cookies. You can't even search the site if you don't accept cookies, no other site I've used fails that way.
