I was just thinking how an open-source product will never work for a mass-market consumer products company, and that this is not really a surprise. I remember wondering this in 2006, but like everyone else, hoped for the best and was glad to see the original Slim Devices team rewarded for bringing a wonderful set of products to market.
Anybody remember the Flip camcorder (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_Video)? The Flip is dead simple to operate and has fewer functions, so mass-market consumers won't get tripped-up. Cisco bought it and didn't know what to do with it. The product had an awesome write-up from David Pogue in the New York Times (this might sound familiar to SB fans), and everyone was and is baffled by Cisco's decision to buy it and their inability to run it. Cisco decided to kill it since the Flip does not fit in with their core product offerings. In my revisionist history, Logitech buys Flip and has a real winner with feature-set extensions all over the place (see webcam for examples). Meanwhile, Cisco buys Slim and the engineers there fall in love with it and help smooth out the wifi kinks. Well, that's how it shoulda gone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mark-e-mark's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4726 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97364 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
