They made a fantastic product and slowly, painfully, failed to innovate away from it.
360 cams are eating our lunch: makes a margina 360 cam
gimbal cameras are eating our lunch: software gimbal
gimbal cameras are STILL eating our lunch: huge hardware gimbal.
They should have gone after the dashcam market, made one that could handle day/night really well for a good price.
It’s always great to see shitty companies fail. This will he a great weekend for me.
Well, perhaps if they just let me normally use it and transfer data without an internet connection and perhaps supported KDE Connect (considering their price tag), I might have considered buying one instead of just improvising a water resistant cover on a raspberry pi camera.
My go pro broke.
At this point, I just use my phone, and there are cheaper options
Also, when I see a fish eye lens in a video, I switch off immediately, because I know immediately that what I’m watching is heavily exaggerated
Practically a penny stock now at less than a dollar
Didn’t GoPro start requiring online activation of their cameras a while back? Like customers couldn’t use it out of the box until they installed the smartphone app and activated it?
Edit: Looks like GoPro did try doing it by using dark patterns first and then getting more aggressive.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gopro/comments/16n6xyr/so_you_need_the_gopro_quik_app_to_activate_the/
And the second highest comment is “wHY arE YoU bUyINg nEW TeCH wItH aN OlD pHOnEeeee?” (Because OP’s complaint is about how they don’t have a phone capable of running the app rather than just a “why the fuck does this need an app?”)
Though there’s a non-zero chance those replies are made by someone with a vested interest. It’s annoying how both those and people who have just drunk the koolaid are pretty much impossible to tell apart.
Hah, and here I was thinking of getting a GoPro as a dash cam/rear cam. Sucks to suck GoPro lost another customer.
A lot of my GoPros already have an overheating problem and battery issues(ballooning). Having them in direct sunlight on the dash or leaving them in the car on a summer day would make that worse. While the picture quality is nice I think they’d make terrible dash cams for day to day constant use.
Most(not all) dedicated dash cams use capacitors and not batteries due to the extreme cold/heat they’re subjected to. The capacitor should provide enough power to gracefully shutdown if you have the cam wired to an auxiliary power wire(turns off with ignition).
Most(not all) dedicated dash cams use capacitors and not batteries due to the extreme cold/heat they’re subjected to.
I genuinely didn’t think of this, trying to a find a dash cam with decent camera quality has been on my to do list. Appreciate the advice.
On the higher end of action cameras, it’s GoPro, DJI, and Insta360 that are very good. They are better than the budget brands. Problem being the budget brands are still pretty good. It follows phones. Before small camera sensors sucked. By like 2015 it reached a point of good enough for the vast majority of people. Good enough 1080p for YouTube. Then 4k came along and the same thing happened where camera sensors at the budget level became good enough for the vast majority of people. So it doesn’t matter if you find people in video communities all trying to get people to buy the $300+ GoPro or DJI action cam or else they’ll regret it, plenty of people will try the ~$100 ones and find them very good for their use case
DJI at least has an evolving drone business. GoPro exists as an experience enhanced brand where the experience enhanced is being undercut by other competitors and on the premium end, DJI sells more stuff and people have a habit of buying stuff from brands they already have. So if you have any thoughts of shooting video with a drone, for an action cam you’ll probably buy DJI. Just want to strap a camera to your helmet or whatever, any of the plethora of ~$100 action cameras will do. GoPro’s lane has shrunken. It has premium competitors while not being competitive for the entry level
Nice to see that at least in the hardware market, competition still works. It is normal for companies who don’t offer competitive value for the money to just fail. This is how market economies are meant to work.
GoPro hasn’t really done anything for the past 5 years at least. Totally on them.
What should they be doing? They are an action camera company, they make action cameras. Do you think they needed to branch out to do energy drinks and lunchables or whatever?
They needed to maintain value and performance. Their value sunk as cheaper competitors closed the gap. And their performance sunk because they were gatekeeping function behind required apps. This is 100% on them. What should they have done? They should have made the product actually better for the user, or lowered prices to expand their sales volume. I would buy one if they cut prices dramatically.
They could try and make a camera that doesn’t overheat and shut down.
They doubled down hard on editing via the phone app with cloud storage via subscription. I have zero desire to edit video on my phone. Their desktop apps are frankly horrendous. They have cameras that capture footage at higher than 4K but their phone app only allowed export at 4K at least on an iPhone. This seemed to be a limit on the h265 libraries on the iPhone so it might be different on Android.
If you wanted to export their 5.6K 360 footage on a desktop from a GoPro Max you couldn’t do that in any sane way. You had to export it in their cine* whatever format and an hour of footage was over 400GB. This also used your graphics card to accelerate it. You could export the h265 files in 4K if memory serves which was obviously smaller and faster but you dropped the resolution as a trade off.
YouTube in a desktop browser supports 360 footage in 5K+ resolutions. I believe the mobile app is still 4K only.
Their camera tech is stagnating. I had plenty of gopros and it’s just almost the same product every year now, they don’t even bother updating the sensor or innovating and look at how DJI and Insta360 is cleaning them out because of it.
I’m curious if their current CEO has more of an engineering or business/finance/marketing background, which would put them in the same pattern numerous other once dominant in their market companies have fallen into.
make action cameras that people want to buy?
instead of pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs which bring no benefit to the consumer?
make action cameras that people want to buy?
instead of pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs which bring no benefit to the consumer?
They might try making cameras that don’t overheat and shut down after 10 minutes…
Precisely. They used to make better products than they do now.
The problems with their products got worse generation on generation. Their older products were more reliable.
And let’s not forget- don’t listen to customers.
Do customers want a ‘Hero 47’ camera with a new one every year? Nope.
Do customers want to be pushed into a paid cloud video storage and editing system that can’t handle the camera’s full resolution? Nope.
Do customers want a reliable camera that has good battery life, doesn’t overheat or crash, and generally works as advertised? YES THEY DO!So what should we do? Let’s release a new camera every year, with the same overheating and firmware bugs, and push people into a phone based video platform.
Now we don’t understand why Insta is doing so well…
Same as it ever was. Line must go up.
1- make good product, make money
2 - make product worse/charge for standard features
3 - cripple existing products, force people to buy new version
pushing the same product with minor updates for greater costs
Works for smartphone manufactuters though
The investment payoff on smartphones is much better. If I make my personal computing device I use for several hours per day 5% better that adds up real quick to serious gains. If I make my gopro I use few hours per week 5% better that barely makes me notice it.
The lower use market needs to make much bigger leaps to justify new revisions just because small stuff is not as noticeable.
the smartphone space has way more competition and their market is literally everyone on the planet. there are 6 billion smart phone buyers.
the vast vast majority of whom, do not need the power in most phones. there is no demand for improving phones, they have peaked. Phones are a commodity at this point, like your average desktop/laptop.
If they have a solid product and do not want to make “energy drinks and lunchables”, the best financial move would be to optimize it. Find ways to make it smaller, lighter, and most importantly, reduce costs.
But if I were in charge, I’d seriously think about trying to eat DJI’s drone lunch now that there are FAA rules around foreign drone companies. GoPro is headquartered in San Mateo. Drone design is well known enough that there aren’t any hard problems in the way of introducing a decent DJI mini replacement. There may be patents or other non-technical stuff in the way though. But if they could get in on that, it could be immensely lucrative, especially if they can get government contracts.
They’re still feeling the burn from when they tried entering the drone space. The GoPro Karma almost bankrupted them on its own, and marked the end of their perception as a quality brand. It was a disaster they never recovered financially or reputationally.
The concept was great. The gimbal and camera could actually be removed from the drone to use independently. People were excited for their entry into the space, and they built a TON of the drones.
But they were also missing features. They didn’t have an API for third-party integration and flight automation like DJI. They had no collision avoidance features, which had started to become standard in the market by the time the entered. Their battery life was pretty bad.
Oh - and upon release the drones constantly lost connection to GPS and would suddenly shut off mid-flight and fall out of the sky. The FAA actually advised all users to ground them.
They eventually recalled all of the Karma drones over safety concerns, took a huge stock hit, and went through a round of layoffs.
Marketers shouldn’t have gotten involved until they knew they had a solid product. Without the hype they generated, there wouldn’t have been the reputation hit. And without the heavy volume produced to try to meet a demand inflated by hype, they could have fixed at least some of the issues.
Though it sounds like the root of the problem was that no one who had power over business or engineering decisions had any passion for making a great drone.
Frankly, that second idea seems really consistent with whatever residual brand value they have.
Unfortunately, they got burned by doing it poorly around 2017 and seem to have been scared off of playing in that space ever.
The first is probably already done but maybe not enough to keep the niche afloat. If the GoPro’s need replacement, then they won’t have a reputation for durability. If they keep going, then why replace your old one when it already does 4k 60fps? Problem is either they need replacement and erode brand strength, or are durable and can’t compete with already owned product. That path probably most likely ends with selling themselves to some other company that will probably slap the name on random Chinese cameras.
Mini drone that follows/records the user and wide angle panoramas of the surrounding area at the same time.
Get to it, gopro. Be the change you wish to see.
What a crazy fuckup. You have a household name almost for action cameras and you keep releasing overpriced crappy products.
A lot of the comments look to me like part of the reason for the failure. At least the old ones continue to work almost forever. They product was so good that people aren’t replacing them. This leads to them releasing overpriced crappy products to make up for it.
I wish we lived in a world where making the best product, that is reliable and durable, for as cheap as possible was standard and made sense. We’ve essentially made it so it doesn’t work.
The correct option seems to be, to me, for them to not have scaled like they have. They should have been a niche durable action camera, and their costs would have stayed low. Every product that sells though is told they have to scale as much as possible forever, until it kills the product.
I suppose their shareholders had other ideas, they just failed to have the right people piloting that ship. Other companies took over their space and now it’s too late. They should probably attempt what you said, scale back and just release a solid action camera again.
I wonder if there are other " genericized trademark" companies that have failed that spectacularly. You can still buy Frigidaire refrigerators. Vaccuuming is known as “hoovering” in the UK, and Hoover is still around.
It would be pretty interesting if “a GoPro” exists as a word for an action camera and the company / brand no longer exists.
The Harley Davidson or Fender business model.
And the exact same model just rebranded!
Meanwhile my old GoPro Hero 4 is somehow the most reliable action camera I own, and my newer one constantly stops recording due to something. I bought an Insta360 as an alternative a couple years ago and the batteries are all already toast, and last maybe 30 seconds of recording.
my newer one constantly stops recording due to something.
For a while they kept putting the same old processor in that couldn’t handle the load. GoPros shutting off due to overheating or recording too long was just normal.
Dunno if it’s still the case. I switched to DJI and you can’t even compare the two. Quality, smart design, price, reliability; these are not GoPro things. I record for an hour plus sometimes and just flawless. Don’t have to think about it.
I see a lot of action cams on the used marketplace selling for cheap. What’s a good one to buy? Or are they all toast?
Theyre all really good now, and all priced very similarly. All have strengths and weaknesses but you can’t really go wrong with any of them.
Unfortunately they all require a proprietary app and associated account so I’ll never buy another one.
GoPro rested on their laurels and DJI and Insta360 are eating their lunch now.
I got a gopro for a project and basically gave up on copying the video files to my computer…
Insta360 really wants to take the higher end of gopro. As in, beating them at quality. There’s a bazillion lower end models with varying quality, some rather decent.
I have the insta360 acepro 2, and recording quality is really good, i think better than gopro. But it’s a brick of a camera to hold, rather heavier. I didn’t have issues with batteries myself, i have an original one and 2 off market ones, so far all working Ok.
I really regret not buying one of the earlier GoPros. The Insta360 frankly has been a huge disappointment. The batteries are really awful.
I still have an original GoPro HD Hero and it still works fine. Battery is like 50% capacity as expected, but yeah, otherwise still working.
They’ve always been kinda crappy. I don’t think that changed so much as competition got better. And then as competition got better, they started doing things like stupidly priced dongles for external audio input. This has been a slow burn in the works for a long time.
At the beginning they weren’t “kinda crappy” because there really wasn’t anything else you could compare them to. Nobody else made a camera that you could strap to your chest, or your helmet, or your motorcycle while you did something action-ey. They had fully waterproof cases too, so you could take them underwater.
As a camera, they weren’t amazing. But, people weren’t using them to take wedding pictures. They were using them in situations where a normal camera would be too heavy, or wouldn’t stay attached, or wouldn’t survive.
There’s a reason they became a household name. They enabled people to do things that had never been done before, and they changed the way a lot of sports are shot.
Agreed. I have a Hero 10 Black and basically every time I go to use it I wind up wanting to hurl it into the sun by the time I’m done. My wife bought it for me as a birthday present a couple of years ago because I asked for one specifically (I didn’t know any better, apparently) so it would probably be rude to do so, though.
It overheats, it randomly shuts off, it routinely experiences a firmware crash that renders all of its buttons inoperable and requires pulling the battery to cure. Oh, and it also has a battery life best measured in seconds so you need to keep it plugged in to external power all the time which requires an aftermarket accessory. Brilliant.
With any luck mine will get taken out in some spectacular and marketable fashion, preferably while recording at top quality so I can post it and use the video revenue to buy an Insta Ace or something.
Cries in Hero 7.
I can’t even plug mine into my PC and use it as a 4k webcam :/
Not almost, “GoPro” is absolutely a household name, they were the only realistic choice for action cameras for an incredibly long time.
It’s also a verb, I’ve heard people talk about “GoPro-ing” something many times before.
Absolutely nuts how far they’ve fallen.
…sooooo what you’re saying is they’ll be coming out with a GonePro soon?
thank you, thank you…I’ll see my way out
I appreciate a good amateur comedian, but I really think you have the chops to GoPro.
angryupvote
Gone Pro sounds like maybe they leveled up from amateur. A lack of them in the future would be NoPro
You rang?
The new GoBlo Yourself.
How did they fuck it up that bad. All thry need to do is keep selling an ok camera
They stopped selling an OK camera and started selling cameras that overheat in the shade with dark patterns to try and force you into using their mobile app for video processing.
I disagree there, the market of people who record their outdoors activities was always limited and quickly got boring. Eventually, competitors caught up and many of them focused on products in better form factors for non-extreme sports that were better for a wider range of people. There is a reason why the likes of DJI and Insta360 are the goto products for those that don’t utilize larger cameras.
Yeah I got my hero 7 many years ago and have sat on it. Does the job. If I were to upgrade I’d go the i360 route.
Between DJI Action 6 and Insta360 X5 on the high end, and the cheap knockoffs on the low end, GoPro is in a big pinch. Unless they pull a totally new rabbit out of the hat.
I’m on my second gopro (a hero 10). It will overheat in the shade outside in summer. The battery also crapped out quite early, though they did find another one to send me (I bought it new from them directly, but after newer models released). I don’t see myself buying another of their cameras.
They all overheat.
My old Hero 7 is going strong. Yes, there might be cheaper options now, but they were strong options at some point at least.
The paradox of a good company and product.
Make a good product with good ownership terms by the customer, and why would there be repeat business?
