Image via WikipediaWhen
Rupert Murdoch bought
MySpace, that was hot property. And he looked like a genius when he paid $500 million for the service, and promptly got
Google to pay him $900 million to run ads on the property. And that was the pinnacle. It was downhill after that for MySpace. Murdoch's corporate machine killed the whole operation with the usual jujitsu.
How you do it is you put a corporate guy on top of the whole thing, and that big shot starts thinking he is some kind of a big shot, he fires a few key people, he reorganizes a little bit. After all he has to cast the impression he is actually doing something. And that messes things up. There is no one in charge. The emphasis is no longer on innovation. It is on pleasing the corporate guy who, by the way, wants yet more ads shown on the property, because there are numbers to be met. They don't realize that might take away from the experience because they don't use MySpace in the first place, they just want to be the boss of it.
And now what do we have here? Cisco is flipping Flip. Flip was also hot when it got bought. That is why it got bought in the first place. Flip was supposed to be
Cisco's own little
iPod, that signature device that everyone but everyone carries and makes Cisco look cool.
