“Put me down as a skeptic regarding Cisco’s acquisition yesterday of Pure Digital, the maker of Flip video recorders. In fact, my first thought wasn’t whether this meant Cisco could compete with Apple. Rather, my first thoughts were about why it can’t,” Peter Burrows writes for BusinessWeek.
“For starters, Apple is all about gut marketing. The company seems to be genetically in touch with the prevailing, mainstream (or at least the elitist, aspirational) zeitgeist. Forget the focus groups, just Think Different. Other than some heartstring-tugging ads of late for its Telepresence videoconferencing systems, I’ve always found Cisco’s consumer marketing to be corporate and not very genuine,” Burrows writes.
“Apple is also all about user experience. Steve Jobs moves heaven and earth to make sure there’s not one too many clicks required to play a song or find a file, and rages against unsightly screw-holes that might mar a product’s aesthetic appeal. Cisco? Not so much. There have been incremental improvements in the ease of use of those Linksys routers. Now, they’re approaching not misery-inducing to configure. That’s not good enough, when you’re selling ‘wanna have’ products like the Flip,” Burrows writes.
Full article here.
