Around the time of the Pure Digital acquisition, Cisco was making a push into the home. They started buying up consumer brands like Flip and Linksys. I can't sp

Around the time of the Pure Digital acquisition, Cisco was making a push into the home. They started buying up consumer brands like Flip and Linksys. I can't speak to why--perhaps their enterprise growth had slowed due to the recession? Anyways, they floundered with the consumer brands for a while before killing them (Flip) or selling them off (Linksys). People hypothesize that the rise of smartphones killed off Flip, but I really believe it was the Cisco acquisition that killed it. I think Flip could have otherwise survived for a few more years out of a tail of slow adopters before pivoting to a GoPro-type market. I worked on the Flip Mino, but as a consultant, not a Pure Digital employee. I followed them fairly closely, but didn't have much inside information, so the above is just my own hypothesis. Though OP's article seems to have come to the same conclusion.