Today’s news that Cisco will shutter Flip Video is a bad decision on so many levels that it is difficult to fit them all into one discussion. But for the sake of this blog, let’s focus on two. When Cisco first purchased Flip, many analysts, including me, questioned whether the buy was a good fit. But abandoning it now seems a cowardly act, and one that flies in the face of common sense.
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I was in Southern California a couple of weeks ago and had a chance to attend the grand opening of the 8th Microsoft store in South Coast Plaza, one of Southern California’s premier retail destinations. While I have been in several of the stores since the Oct. 2009 opening of Microsoft’s first store in Scottsdale, Arizona, and had the good fortune to talk to the GM on the phone a few times, this marked the first time I was able to experience the energy and excitement of an opening.
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Hot on the heels of the opening of the 8th Microsoft store comes news that Sony has opened a new concept Sony Style location in the Century City mall in Los Angeles. While, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to visit yet, Sony offers this nice walkthrough on its blog site.
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All the tech blogs and pundits are beating their drums about the potential launch of the iPad 2 on Wednesday. Assuming that is what this event will introduce it would be much more worthwhile to concentrate on what is really important to the future of the iPad, and the tablet category in general. To-date all we have heard are the typical pronouncements and concerns about new processors, thinness, or what the screen resolution is. While all these elements are important the most important things to concentrate on for the long-term success of tablets are pricing and distribution, both of which are discussed minimally at best.
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Best Buy’s poor results today are not a glimpse into the future but a mirror into the past. As we have been saying for much of 2010 this year is likely to be a very difficult one for most consumer electronics categories. Very high penetration rates and the effect of two years of growth above the overall retail economy have put consumer electronics ahead of the curve. It is now time that the rest of the market catches up.
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NPD has released its Consumer Technology Black Friday week sales data, and based on my analysis I think the most reasonable conclusion is to view the results as a glass being half full. Yes, the overall sales (in dollars) were down, but the pockets of strength we saw were surprising, and in my view encouraging, at least if are willing to look beyond Dec 25th.
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As the early returns come in on the holiday shopping weekend results from various sources, including NPD’s Anatomy of Black Friday consumer survey, a few things are becoming clear. While brick-and-mortar stores likely had a tough time on Black Friday, as we estimate electronics sales up only minimally overall, online sales truly came into their own this year. For those of us in the consumer technology business that is no surprise, sales have been growing rapidly online for a few years. But a funny thing happened on the way to this sales growth. What clearly propelled this year’s growth was the online marketplace’s embrace of traditional retail marketing tactics.
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Having just returned from my annual Black Friday morning shopping trip I am struggling to suppress a yawn. Not just because I got up at 2:45AM, but because I have to confess, once again, that I just didn’t see anything as I shopped today that either changes my general outlook on the holiday for tech or provides a window into how aggressively consumers may be shopping for electronics. As I said last year, giving away highly-desirable products in limited quantities for outrageously low prices is always going to draw a crowd. However, at some point you begin to bump into the realities of installed bases, low prices, and relevancy. This year’s struggle to determine what the most relevant, most exciting products to sell was especially acute and I believe will lead to lackluster results, similar to what we’ve seen all year.
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In a typically bad reference to very good Shakespeare NPD’s recently completed Wireless Printing Survey (and HP’s Innovation event a couple of months ago in NYC) force us to ask that age old question.
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The 2010 consumer technology holiday outlook looks increasingly dark as we approach the end of October and the real kick-off of the holiday selling season. In today’s TWICE Webinar we detailed some of our reasoning behind NPD’s pessimistic outlook.
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Consumer Technology | Stephen Baker, Vice President, Industry Analysis | 
April 12, 2011 10:55 am | 
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