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Provacative: Michael Cioni at NAB 2017 – “Do I have Stockholm Syndrome with Apple?”
Definitely worth the time to watch if you care about the future of Apple in video.
https://youtu.be/i117f6RUKosCreator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
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30 Replies
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Was he kidnapped by Apple? Abducted against his will and held for a long period of time? Forced to use their products until he ‘came around’?
No? Hm.
Words mean things. I hate clickbait. He may well have a compelling message, but this kind of thing really twists my onion.
Doug Metz
Anode
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Michael explains PRECISELY the context and limitations of his use of the title in the opening of his presentation.
One person’s clickbait is another persons window into intelligent discourse.
How about you address the ISSUES he addresses, rather than merely the form he uses to package them? Perhaps then we can all benefit from your thinking?
Just a suggestion.
Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery. -
Thanks for posting. Michael Cioni’s talk is fascinating and gets to the heart of the Apple conundrum.
My personal take would be that the Apple leadership team is way too late to focus it’s energy now on the professional user base and how to better service their needs. However, I can only use my own experience as reference though.
The emotional attachment that Cioni uses to define the unique connection that professional users have with Apple is also I think at the core of why some of us have abandoned the company altogether.
In my own experience, I was completely loyal to the company and it’s product line for about 25 years. And for most of that time the products served me well. But the seismic shift that occurred in the editing marketplace starting in 2011 introduced the idea that Apple had abandoned it’s commitment to the professional user. For me, that was the start of viewing the company in a much more critical light. I went from loyal customer and fan to an emotionally detached critic.
And the idea of jumping ship was made easier when Adobe fully developed it’s platform agnostic creative suite.
I now happily work on a PC and my MBP gathers dust. The decision to leave the company wasn’t an easy one due to the length of the relationship but the funny thing is that once the decision was made to leave the fold a feeling of liberation took over.
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[Bill Davis] “How about you address the ISSUES he addresses, rather than merely the form he uses to package them? Perhaps then we can all benefit from your thinking?
“Perhaps you should have made the boundaries of discussion clearer when you made the original post 🙂
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[Bill Davis] “Michael explains PRECISELY the context and limitations of his use of the title in the opening of his presentation.
And he completely omits the component of Stockholm Syndrome that makes it what it is. Tragic and terrible. It completely misrepresents the genesis and nature of the relationship.
[Bill Davis] One person’s clickbait is another persons window into intelligent discourse.
One person’s desire to share a difficult decision and the reasons behind it does not gain credibility by conflating a tragedy with a conundrum. In my opinion.
[Bill Davis] How about you address the ISSUES he addresses, rather than merely the form he uses to package them? Perhaps then we can all benefit from your thinking? “
I will be watching later today, when I’ve got this project buttoned up and sent to the client. Again, I’m sure he’s got a compelling message worthy of discussion. My knee-jerk reaction to the title has left my jaw bruised, but my opinion unchanged. I was not directing my irritation at you, Bill… just venting until I can watch the whole thing. Won’t happen again, I can assure you.
Doug Metz
Anode
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[Steve Connor] “Perhaps you should have made the boundaries of discussion clearer when you made the original post :)”
Well, I’d like to hope that people would watch a video before commenting on it…and the comment on the actual video….but the distinction between debate and kvetching may apparently be too nuanced. ????
IT’S NOT MEANT TO BE LITERAL….but as a simile, Stockholm Syndrome is perfectly apt. More than the question whether your commitment to Apple is not only greater than Apple’s commitment to you — which for most people, isn’t really a question anymore — it’s raising the question of whether your commitment to Apple might be at the detriment to your long-term best interests.
It’s a much more nuanced question than “Does Apple care about pros” , which was always tired. The more relevant question, and the one that Michael explores in a very interesting way is, does Apple’s long-term vision for Apple make it likely that they’ll deliver the products and services that I need to fulfill my own long-term vision for MY company….or might Apple’s well-acknowledged (even by its fans) strategy of NOT pursuing the highest-end performance or expandability, with computers that are iterated very slowly, force limitations on our growth that we would not otherwise impose?
It’s not an anti-Apple position, nor does it even a little bit imply that Apple doesn’t care about pros. For that matter, Apple has only a smart part to play in the workflows that Panavision or Hollywood-style production at large touch on. But all of those other folks are going pedal to the metal to expand in every direction — storage, throughput, cameras, grading, monitoring, software for other parts of the production, etc etc.
But Apple’s role is typically an important one, especially in Hollywood, historically the most Apple of towns, but increasingly less so, for exactly some of the reasons Michael lays out, and that Greg touches on his his post here. Not “ANTI” Apple, but, “Hmmm, if Apple gave me the solution I needed, I’d be happy to pay for it…but they haven’t, so I’m moving on.” That was certainly my own story.
Michael raises the stakes because he’s in a leadership position that carries considerable responsibility not just for Panavision, but for every production that Panavision touches, in Hollywood and beyond, and he has to look many years down the road. These are exactly the kind of questions he NEEDS to be asking….
…even if you don’t. ????
Certainly the Hollywood/Panavision angle skews the conversation, but that’s pretty much the definition of high-profile. ???? There are very few people of his stature willing to think out loud in front of a room full of people ready to pounce…plus, say, the internet…..so I think that actually discussing what he’s saying might be especially productive.
We as a forum mini-community are actually pretty good at thinking about this stuff and discussing it with each other, so I’d like to give it a try again here.
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[Doug Metz] “Won’t happen again, I can assure you.
“I REALLY think it’s up to you whether it happens again, video was put forward for discussion and you gave your opinion on an element of it. Nothing wrong with that
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[Tim Wilson] “Well, I’d like to hope that people would watch a video before commenting on it.”
and I’d like to hope that if something is put forward for discussion then any element of it is up for discussion without having someone shout at you for discussing the “wrong” thing, especially on a forum that can wander OT as much as this one.
The video is excellent, I watched it while editing some 4K video on my 2009 Mac Pro! as you say it’s great that someone in his position is talking about it. Apple certainly dropped the ball at some point on the Pro Computer front and perhaps in the future we might learn the truth of why that happened. I’m just glad they refocusing on it now.
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Cioni misuses the term “Stockholm Syndrome” because, while inappropriate and inaccurate, it sounds sexier than “fanboy” which is the precise and accurate description of his condition.
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[Steve Connor] “and I’d like to hope that if something is put forward for discussion then any element of it is up for discussion without having someone shout at you for discussing the “wrong” thing, especially on a forum that can wander OT as much as this one.”
Fair enough. I hope your reference to (me?) “shouting at you” is a simile and doesn’t reflect what you feel I was actually doing. I thought I was being uncharacteristically calm…but since I’m so rarely calm, I don’t know exactly what that’s like. ???? Apologies nonetheless.
And I do think that it’s always appropriate to consider the propriety of similes. We’ve actually turned THOSE discussions into some of our most productive. It turns out that FCPX is exactly like a car after all. ????
Doug is right that imagery related to terrorism shouldn’t be taken lightly. Some similes are inevitably going to chafe. I certainly breezed past that, and I shouldn’t have. My apologies for that too.
That said, “Stockholm Syndrome” has been used in relation to Apple customers for YEARS. The first reference I can find in a speedy search is from 2007, Do Apple Users Just Have Stockholm Syndrome, by Jacob Rosenberg. He’s the head of Infrastructure Engineering at Bloomberg, and asking the same kinds of questions that Michael is asking, for the same reasons, with 2 additional notes.
One, Rosenberg is quick to point out that he’s merely adapting David Habib’s formulation of Technology Vendor Stockholm Syndrome. David was an infrastructure guy at AOL, so he was speaking very VERY broadly, and didn’t mention Apple at all. So far as I can tell, Rosenberg was the first…
And my second note is to underscore that this was 10 years ago. Since then, the combination of “Apple” and “Stockholm Syndrome” has been used MANY MANY times.
The next major round of it was in a series of articles in 2009, started by a Strand Consulting think piece, picked up by 9to5Mac, and best summed up by ZDNet, Are iPhone Users Suffering from Stockholm Syndrome.
The point Strand made is that when Apple customers adamantly defend Apple’s tardiness to things like 3G (again, this was 2009), it slows down innovation across the entire industry. We’re all better off, says Strand, when we push Apple forward, rather than wholeheartedly embrace its limitations, and dismiss innovation elsewhere as irrelevant.
In 2011, an editorial in the Guardian with the headline The deification of Steve Jobs is Apple’s greatest marketing triumph to date picked apart the dynamics of public grief in the context of Steve’s passing, but also in the context of Jobs being revered in the vast swaths of tech that he helped destroy. But mostly in the context of how weird it was to talk about “love” in the context of tech at all.
Last month the New York Times ran an editorial entitled You Love Your iPhone. Literally. It argued that people respond similarly to images of the Apple logo and images of the Pope; iPhone users, the author stated, after performing tests on babies, literally loved their iPhones. I was shown this editorial by a PR. Even he was amazed that a company should get such coverage or, to give it its proper term, idiotic drooling. Again, this is odd, because the technology Jobs created is destroying newspapers. It makes me wonder if my trade has developed, en masse, Apple-themed Stockholm Syndrome. We love our murderer.
In 2014, Apple Gives Customers the Stockholm Syndrome (a particularly clumsy locution) was written from a developer’s perspective at WWDC that year, bringing up many of these same points in that specific context.
Then last year, IBS Intelligence came at it from the perspective of banking, Apple Pay, Stockholm Syndrome and Sinking Ships: The Future of Mobile Payments.
This isn’t even close to all of the examples. There are hundreds, but I chose a small handful to represent just a few of how many different angles from which people have been poking at this question for at least 10 years now. For better and worse, the combination of Apple users and Stockholm Syndrome has been mainstreamed in multiple industries and contexts for a very long time.
I’ve got some examples of this phenomenon, by whatever name, from the world of FCP in particular (more Legacy than X, actually) that I’ll save for the part of the thread where we talk about the points Michael raises. ????
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