In a presentation at Catalyst a few years ago, Guy Kawasaki talked about the ice market. The ice market long ago consisted of companies that cut up and shipped ice to consumers. This was big and expensive, and required a ship and a long trip to an area where there was lots of ice. As technology improved, it became possible to make ice in a giant warehouse, rather than taking a ship to a very cold climate. As you can imagine, this was vastly simpler, cheaper, and rarely involved sinking to the bottom of the ocean due to a particularly bad storm... Eventually the ice house gave way to the home refrigerator, which was again cheaper and easier. The point? Technology marches on and old ways of doing business die.
The latest casualty is the Flip video camera. For years video cameras have been getting smaller and cheaper. The Flip was an innovative camera that made cheap and "good enough" the standard for personal video. Rather than a big camera with a big zoom lens and tape, the flip was small, portable and shot "good enough" video for people to share. The flip has effectively killed off the bottom of the consumer video camera market, just like the icehouse killed off the ship ice from alaska business...
And then smartphones got video cameras, and the idea of a standalone low end video camera made about as much sense as still having your ice delivered by the local icehouse. Not only was it cheaper (included in the phone you already own or just bought) but it was better. Want to upload it to youtube while you are on the go? The phone will, but the flip? Not unless you plug it into your computer. And just like the home refrigerator killed off the icehouse, the smartphone killed off the flip.
Cisco has taken a lot of grief for this move, and at first glance I think rightly so. They paid nearly $600 Million for the Flip just a few years ago, and now they are shutting the whole business down. But I think the people who claim this is too soon are using bad math. In that article, it is claimed that the market for the flip is somehow 1 billion people. But the very fact that those 1 billion people are the same people that don't want, or cannot afford a smartphone is exactly the problem. Those are the same people that are unlikely to spend money on a brand new video camera. They might already own an older one that is "good enough" or they may find that an older flip or other camera is cheaper on ebay or they might look at it as something that they aren't interested in spending money on.
The point is this: It is a contracting market no matter how you look at it, and serving a rapidly shrinking market (these same people probably argued that not everyone had a fridge at home and there was still a need for an icehouse) is not a good business model. Cisco is making the right move by cutting their losses right now, even though it's a tough decision.
The consumer video camera market as a whole is one that I believe will go way in the face of DSLR's with interchangeable lenses that shoot HD video. For the casual crowd the smartphone meets the need. For the enthusiast crowd the DSLR offers far more than a fixed lens video camera, and the big gaping hole of audio is being remedied fast (Better audio accessories are THE hot accessory for the DSLR market right now). Even some pros are using DSLR's (mostly Canon) to do some pretty impressive projects. RIP consumer video cameras, you have become the icehouse. Viva la iPhone!
Joel
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Monday, April 4, 2011
Moonwalking with Einstein
In a rare spur of the moment buy, I picked up Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
from the "Amazon Recommends" suggestions. The title intrigued me, and it seems like my memory has gotten worse over the years, and frankly I'd like to have some of that back... When I was younger I relied a lot on my memory. In college I didn't take notes, I listened and interacted in class. I found that I learned a retained a lot more that way than if I just dutifully copied down everything the professor said. These days I have trouble remembering what we discussed last week, let alone months ago.
The first and most important thing to say about this book is that it is not a self help book. This is not really a how to, but more of a journey. Joshua Foer is a storyteller, a journalist, who got interested in the strange world of memory competitions and spent a year training himself to win the US Memory Championships (he did). Along the way, he discusses some (but not all) of the techniques involved in such things.
The book is very well written. It is engaging and a quick read. Along the way it teaches the reader some of the techniques for improving your memory. I was skeptical, but it does work. I am generally terrible at memorizing things, but I was able to very quickly memorize a long list of cars & lap times using the techniques in the book (I did it just for grins, to see if it really worked).
The disappointing thing to me is that he really doesn't cover how to memorize poetry, which is one aspect of the memory competitions. Poetry to me bears the most similarity to scripture, which is really what I would like to be better at memorizing. I'd also hoped to learn enough techniques to be able to memorize scripture in Greek or Hebrew, something I have found impossible to do.
One of the important aspects of memory that this book demonstrates is that our memories are a bit like muscles, they need to be exercised to work effectively. In a world in which we dump everything that matters onto our iphones, it's easy to start forgetting everything and I don't think that's healthy.
At the end of the book Foer frets about the limited practical applications for improving your memory using the techniques he learned. He relays how after a year of memory training he went to dinner, and after taking the train home realized he had driven to dinner... It is not a cure for being forgetful, but rather a set of tools to remember things that you want to remember.
Although not a perfect book, this is a fantastic introduction to the world of your own memory. The techniques in here really work, and have me intrigued enough to look for other resources on improving my memory.
Recommended.
Joel
from the "Amazon Recommends" suggestions. The title intrigued me, and it seems like my memory has gotten worse over the years, and frankly I'd like to have some of that back... When I was younger I relied a lot on my memory. In college I didn't take notes, I listened and interacted in class. I found that I learned a retained a lot more that way than if I just dutifully copied down everything the professor said. These days I have trouble remembering what we discussed last week, let alone months ago.The first and most important thing to say about this book is that it is not a self help book. This is not really a how to, but more of a journey. Joshua Foer is a storyteller, a journalist, who got interested in the strange world of memory competitions and spent a year training himself to win the US Memory Championships (he did). Along the way, he discusses some (but not all) of the techniques involved in such things.
The book is very well written. It is engaging and a quick read. Along the way it teaches the reader some of the techniques for improving your memory. I was skeptical, but it does work. I am generally terrible at memorizing things, but I was able to very quickly memorize a long list of cars & lap times using the techniques in the book (I did it just for grins, to see if it really worked).
The disappointing thing to me is that he really doesn't cover how to memorize poetry, which is one aspect of the memory competitions. Poetry to me bears the most similarity to scripture, which is really what I would like to be better at memorizing. I'd also hoped to learn enough techniques to be able to memorize scripture in Greek or Hebrew, something I have found impossible to do.
One of the important aspects of memory that this book demonstrates is that our memories are a bit like muscles, they need to be exercised to work effectively. In a world in which we dump everything that matters onto our iphones, it's easy to start forgetting everything and I don't think that's healthy.
At the end of the book Foer frets about the limited practical applications for improving your memory using the techniques he learned. He relays how after a year of memory training he went to dinner, and after taking the train home realized he had driven to dinner... It is not a cure for being forgetful, but rather a set of tools to remember things that you want to remember.
Although not a perfect book, this is a fantastic introduction to the world of your own memory. The techniques in here really work, and have me intrigued enough to look for other resources on improving my memory.
Recommended.
Joel
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