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Codebreaker

Flip off

John Moe Apr 13, 2011

By now you may have heard that Cisco is shutting down its Flip camera division and laying off 550 workers over the next few months. This is a property that Cisco paid 590 million dollars for back in 2009, so that’s a huge chunk of money to just eat. So why did they shut it down? A lot of people are pointing to the idea that it’s now very common to have a basic video camera built in to your phone so the cheap lug-around camera is already being lugged around.

CNET speculates that Cisco is on the ropes on Wall Street and needed to do something big to show investors it could run lean.

In my mind, it’s another move toward the gadget singularity. Our phones are computers, gaming systems, cameras, music players, movie players, PDAs, and now video cameras too. Are we approaching a world where the phone (or tablet, I suppose) is your primary gadget and everything else is for experts and connoisseurs?

Also, where the heck are we going to put all this stuff that we’re making? Videos are space hogs. Good times ahead for dependable companies selling cloud space.

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