Cisco ūmi

» see cisco.com/umi as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

umi was the kind of product american families with money and grandparents in another state bought (or considered buying) in late 2010. i was not in that demographic. the device shipped only in the us for its first year, the service required a fast home broadband connection that most of turkey did not have at residential prices, and the call destination list was limited to other umi units plus google video chat accounts. that meant the practical use case was an american with money calling another american with money over a $24.99 a month layer on top of their cable internet bill.

the hardware was a small hd camera that sat on top of your television, paired with a black console box and a remote. cisco's enterprise telepresence team built it on the same general technology stack as the company's corporate video-conferencing rooms, scaled down to one camera and a consumer remote. the 1080p video quality was genuinely better than skype on a laptop at the time. that was the entire pitch, the box delivered cinema-quality video to your tv instead of laptop-quality video to your laptop.

john chambers presented it at a cisco event on october 6, 2010 with the line about cisco bringing people together through new video experiences. by then skype had been doing free video calls on the same television sets through a few partner tv manufacturers for almost two years. logitech was about to ship the revue google tv box at a comparable price point with skype built in. umi was launching into a category that had already commoditized around free.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

the reviews were respectful about the picture quality and skeptical about the price. engadget called the hardware impressive and the math impossible at launch in october. the early adopter base looked like cisco's existing brand fans plus a small number of telepresence enthusiasts who wanted the better video. that was never going to be a market large enough to justify the consumer hardware division cisco was building around it. the holiday 2010 sales numbers were never disclosed publicly, which is the polite tell.

~ the fall ~

cisco cut the price by $100 in march 2011, dropped the base box to $499, and added a 720p variant called umi 720 at $399 that needed less bandwidth. the monthly fee stayed at $24.99 for unlimited calling, with a $9.99 light plan covering 6 hours per month. that pricing tier was already too late. the underlying problem was not the dollar amount on the hardware, it was the very existence of a monthly fee for a feature skype gave away for free on the same screen.

~ the day it died ~

cisco announced in may 2012 that the entire consumer products group was being restructured and folded into the company's collaboration division. the umi product line was quietly stopped as part of that restructuring. by august 2012 the consumer box had been pulled from sale. the existing units kept working for a while on the service backend, the call destination list had already collapsed to just other umi units after google video chat was retired by google in 2013. cisco kept a small enterprise telepresence pilot using some of the same hardware for a few more years.

~ the long tail ~

the umi failure became one of the standard 2010s case studies in over-engineered consumer hardware launches. nest had launched in october 2011 selling smart thermostats at $249 with no monthly fee, dropcam shipped wi-fi cameras at $149 with optional cloud storage. those were the consumer hardware companies that actually shipped video products into american living rooms during the same window. cisco's bet that families would pay enterprise-style subscription fees for living-room video was the part that aged the worst.

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