Sobre la muerte de las cámaras Flip

Las Flip eran unas cámaras de ví­deo digitales, creadas por una startup que fue comprada por Cisco por $500 millones. Cisco ha decidido finalizar su producción. David Pogue clava el análisis en este artí­culo:

But most of the world doesn’t buy iPhones. Of the one billion cellphones sold annually, a few million are iPhones. The masses still have regular cellphones that don’t capture video, let alone hi-def video. They’re the people who buy Flip camcorders. It’s wayyyyyy too soon for app phones to have killed off the camcorder.

Second, it isn’t true at all that nobody’s buying Flip camcorders. So far, seven million people have bought them. Only a month ago, I was briefed by a Flip product manager on the newest model, which was to hit the market Wednesday. He showed me a graph of the Flip’s sales; Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 best-selling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast.

Look at it this way: There are plenty of Flip copycats, from Kodak and other companies. They have only a fraction of the Flip’s popularity, but you don’t see them shutting down.

So why did Cisco kill off the flip?