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The Big Picture
OK, I’m going to delude myself for a few minutes, and pretend that this post will come to the attention of the decision makers at Adobe.
And I have some advice to give them: Put all available resources into further development of Premiere Pro.
Virtually all of Adobe’s customers are in ICC (Image Content & Creation). Adobe’s dominance in this huge space allows them to remain (I believe this is still true) the second largest software company in the world.
They have achieved this success in most product categories by maintaining an edge over the competition for a long enough period of time for their products became de-facto standards.
That never happened with Premiere. Avid’s early dominance in the NLE market scared Adobe into keeping Premiere as a second tier product focused on the prosumer market. It took Apple, and more specifically Steve Job’s cojones, to take on Avid, quite successfully as it turned out.
If this is a war (and it kind of is), Adobe would be advancing on most fronts, but the line is weak and faltering on the NLE front. By grabbing dominance in this area, Apple sells tied-in products like Motion and Shake – a flanking maneuver. Looks like Apple is winning this battle. Even more impressively, they are winning the Avid war at the same time.
And in the process, they have revealed Avid’s weakness: top-heavy expensive infrastructure built on an antique foundation. Avid will topple eventually, causing great hardship for its supporters.
But this war has stretched Apple’s supply lines. They found their tanks don’t have enough horsepower to compete with the PC tanks, causing an expensive and time-consuming redeployment. Although their front lines are advancing with great speed and courage, they will not be able to stand up to a sustained counter-strike from superior forces.
NOW is the time for Adobe to mass the troops (from the other fronts if necessary), and push Premiere to the top of the hill. The battle plan is to design and deploy a better product, and keep it there until it becomes a de-facto standard; same strategy that has worked for them in the past. But now the enemy is showing their weakness.
By winning this battle, Adobe will win the war. And they will get to keep all the marbles.
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33 Replies
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A probably accurate picture of the state of the NLE wars at the present moment, Eric. It would surprise me if the folks at Adobe aren’t aware of their opportunities. And now that Axio, and to some extent, Cineform, are displaying leading edge, state of the art capabilities on PPro that can’t be matched on FCP systems, Adobe really has a golden opportunity to grab a good share of the professional pie. Whether they’re up to it or not should become clear with the release of 2.0… the features they’ve added and their effort to market it. One thing is clear, they won’t have another 20 month development cycle to fall back on if they come up terribly short of what the market wants.
David
AllinOneFilms.com -
By increasing the frequency of their updates, Adobe could make more money. Pro users wouldn’t mind paying a couple of hundred bucks every six months or so. To be fair to the little guys, Adobe could make the updates retroactive to 1.0, so users would have the option of skipping a few releases without paying a financial penalty.
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I remember the bloody screams when there was only an 8 or 9 month delay between 1.0 and 1.5
So many people cried… “We just want bug fixes not new features.”
Adobe can’t win no matter what they do.
Steven
Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5.1 / After Effects 6.5 Pro https://www.stevengotz.com
Learning Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 https://www.lynda.com
Contributing Writer, PeachPit Press, Visual QuickPro Guide, Premiere Pro 1.5 -
While I would love to see Adobe dominate, they will never topple Avid.
Avid has a massive user base including nearly all the major broadcasters world-wide (and more are signing up), major film makers and their image processing companies, colleges (get the students early) and many thousands of TV news companies… the list goes on.
Avid have only been chasing the broadcast world for the last 5-years or so and already they dominate with a mass migration of TV stations happening right now. Avid supply a proven and complete end to end solution – Adobe don’t.
Adobe lost the chance to dominate a long time ago by aiming for the professional market that Avid had already won. Wrong market. They should have put their investment into the growing semi-pro/home market.
I’m not saying that PPro isn’t up to full professional use but rather there are serious workflow issues with the application and the audio handling is done in a way that no full time professional would ever use.
I’d be absolutely amazed if PPro 2.0 addressed all the problems with the application. I genuinely hope they do but I’ll wait and see before I part with my money again.
As for Avid systems being: top-heavy expensive infrastructure built on an antique foundation. That’s very far from the truth as any professional using the application will tell you. They’re not cheap admitedly but no decent, reliable software is.
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Professional editors will naturally gravitate to the best software available. Right now admittedly this is Avid – due to the fact that they wrote some great software in 1995. Their current competition, Apple and Adobe, started out as prosumer applications that sold for a tiny fraction of the cost of the big Avids.
But they are catching up in the professional market. Apple in particular is kicking Avid’s butt pretty bad right now.
We are entering a new era in editing now. Integration across a suite of applications is important. High performance HD is important. Digital media management is important. Anything to do with tape or film is becoming irrelevant.
It’s true that broadcasters and Hollywood will hold on to their Avids way too long, but that is the least of their problems. Cable is eating broadcasters, and will in turn be eaten by the phone company. Independant film and bootleggers will rise to snuff out Hollywood. Networks will die as people access programming on demand. People won’t watch movies in theatres any more. Apple will make ipods that fit in your navel, and we will be pledging allegiance to Microsoft, Adobe, and Ma Bell.
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And pigs will fly!!
Anything to do with tape or film is becoming irrelevant
Mmm, you may be a bit premature there. It will be a very long time before anything optical or magnetic disk-based will achieve the price/ruggedness that tape has. You may get away with that in the pro-sumer market but the pros and broadcasters cannot justify the expense of disk media. Tape is so cheap that broadcasters and professionals can afford to keep the original media. To achieve the same with any disk-based media at the same quality as can be recorded on tape will require massive investment and ongoing costs.
As for film, while people still enjoy going to the cinema or watching DVDs at home, film will survive as the preferred aquisition format. The only thing challenging film is HD aka George Lucas, which is incredibly expensive to use and guess what? It is recorded to tape!
Most film material is transferred to tape for processing and editing before being printed back to film for distribution. Distribution will go down the fully electronic route eventually around the world but still the aquisition will remain on film for a very long time to come.
It’s true that broadcasters and Hollywood will hold on to their Avids way too long
When they have thousands of skilled Avid users for a very reliable platform why would they not want to hang on to them? Why would they want to change? Big money spenders like broadcasters and film production companies will always use the applications that best meet their requirements and where this is a large market of skilled staff.
Apple in particular is kicking Avid’s butt pretty bad right now.
That may be the case in the US in some areas but far from the case in Europe and many other parts of the world where Avid’s dominance is increasing massively. Europe in particular is going through an enormous equipment upgrade as they move from analogue to digital formats for aquisition and transmission and it is Avid that have dominated this upgrade process as they can provide the broadcasters with a fully proven, very cost effective end-to-end solution – not Apple and not Adobe. Avid also have the resources to fully support it. When has Adobe ever responded to the need of an individual? Why do you think that Premier Pro users are so dependent on forums such as these?
Once Apple moves over to the Intel platform, FCP will be in for a very big suprise from Avid. That is just one reason why Adobe have to make PPro 2.0 what it should have been all along. If they don’t get it right this time they may as well give up the professional market place altogether and stick with Premier Elements and the growing (and profitable) consumer market and let FCP take over from what Adobe should have been aiming for.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been a big fan of Premier and will continue to be (version 2 depending).
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Eric,
[Eric Jurgenson] “Apple will make ipods that fit in your navel, and we will be pledging allegiance to Microsoft, Adobe, and Ma Bell.”
Or…, maybe most folks will get sick of it all and go back to baking pies, playing checkers and softball, and making love, and we can pledge allegiance to something of real value.
While I’m probably closer to the opinion of Mr. Hewitt, I’m enjoying your interplay.
Ron Shook
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Hey Ron,
I think I prefer your version. Besides, all the others have far outlived anything else, are either free or edible… well mostly!
Richard.
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[R. Hewitt] “Once Apple moves over to the Intel platform, FCP will be in for a very big suprise from Avid.”
I’m not sure what you are saying with this comment. Please expand. Thanks
Dave
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[Eric Jurgenson] “By increasing the frequency of their updates, Adobe could make more money. Pro users wouldn’t mind paying a couple of hundred bucks every six months or so.”
Yikes… If there is one thing I’ve learned during my tenure with PPro…it’s that NO individual user speaks for the entire user-base…or even a significant part of it. As Steven recalls, Adobe took all kind of abuse for releasing PPro 1.5 as quickly as they did…and users were commenting on how Adobe was just back emptying their wallets again.
Premiere Pro is a piece of software that is expected to…and is attempting to…do everything for everybody. With the release of Premiere Elements at least the pressure is off for PPro to be usable at the basic level and they can start to move up a bit.
Bottom line is that anyone who contends they know what Ppro users in general, want…is speaking for themselves and whatever fraction of users find themselves in duplicate circumstances…and it’s always a smaller fraction of the whole than one might think.
TimK,
Kolb Syverson Communications,
Creative Cow Host,
2004-2005 NAB Post Production Conference
Premiere Pro Technical Chair,
Author, “The Easy Guide to Premiere Pro” http://www.focalpress.com
“Premiere Pro Fast Track DVD Series” http://www.classondemand.net
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