Avid laying off 120 people

[Grinner Hester]

[Scott Carnegie] “Cutting Media Composer pricing by 50% isn’t an effort? C’mon”

Would you as a user or owner not rather have better quality and more options? An admission that thier products are worth half of what they tried to first reem their client base for is hardly a step in the right direction.
…in my opinion, of course.

[Scott Carnegie]

All good points Ron. I think that we as consumers of editing packages are better off the more competition there is between manufacturers and the healthier each individual company is. I certinaly don’t hope for any of these companies to go under, but it is likely to happen one day.

In the end, companies need to respond to customer demand, espeically in a hard market with so many options like NLE. If they don’t respond to demand, they lose.

http://www.MediaCircus.TV
Media Production Services
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

[Scott Carnegie]

” An admission that thier products are worth half of what they tried to first reem their client base for is hardly a step in the right direction. ”

I see it as a response to the market demand, that’s what a smart business would do. Keeping a price too high to prove a point would be very bad business.

http://www.MediaCircus.TV
Media Production Services
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

[Scott Carnegie]

“Thank you for stating your bias honestly, Scott. ”

Thought that would be fair 🙂

It seems that much of what we are talking about is marketing, and Apple has done a top notch job of marketing not just FCP but the Apple brand in the last few years. I see more “common people” with Macs than ever beforem whereas it used to just be editors and graphics artists that would have a Mac.

http://www.MediaCircus.TV
Media Production Services
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

[Grinner Hester]

[Shane Ross] “Avid isn’t going to go away. Too many post facilities, TV production and new production facilities and television and film productions rely on it.”

This has been Avid’s thinking. Hence the drop in position. Truth is, all of those workflows rely on edit solutions and the truth is there are rapidly becoming more viable solutions.
For me personally, it’s not so much their decline in product as others have grown (though that is a factor to consider), it’s their dishonesty through this growing pain process. It makes it veeery hard for folks like me to roll the dice on things like MC4 (the new MC 4, not the first one 😉
The fact that their a dice-rolling factor at all says alot about where they are. Mix that with the massive and understandable distrust they have created and, well, folks get laid off.
I think every indistry ahs two kinds of companies. Those who play for keeps and those who are temporary. I don’t see Avid as a for keeps kind of company anymore.

[Tim Wilson]

[Scott Carnegie] “I don’t think it is a fair criticism to make of a company that they want to spend their resources on their own product rather than someone elses.”

Our point is simply that Avid’s strategy of disappearance from other forums, and from any website but their own, has helped them disappear from the public eye.

It’s not just for forums, though. Look around the web. Apart from Avid’s own press releases here and there, you’d think Avid already HAD stopped selling new products.

Avid wanted to disappear from anywhere but its own site? Mission accomplished. It’s a measure of Avid’s success with this strategy that we live in a world in which Avid is irrelevant, if not entirely absent, for anyone but their current customers.

We didn’t ask them for money. We asked Avid if they wanted our help elevating their profile through a variety of platforms beyond the forums (web articles, magazine, newsletters, podcasts, etc.), and they told us no. We tried again as recently as last month, and haven’t had the courtesy of a reply.

We don’t take it personally. We see it as consistent with the policy that they told us that they would pursue three years ago, and that they have.

That’s their prerogative. But it’s also fair of us to criticize them for what we see as a short-sighted, and ultimately self-defeating strategy. Reducing the web footprint that you can get for free is not part of anyone’s recipe for success.

As Ron observes, banner ads at MacWorld.com aren’t enough to compensate for this.

[Ron Lindeboom]

[Scott Carnegie] “I don’t think it is a fair criticism to make of a company that they want to spend their resources on their own product rather than someone elses.”

Dog breeders and royalty do this also, Scott. Unfortunately, in the end, it pulls from a shallower genepool and in the end breeds a lack of diversity and has birthed things that are sickly and twisted.

But hey, it “kept the money among the royals,” so it served its purpose — even if later generations paid for all the inbreeding.

Ron Lindeboom

[Grinner Hester]

So would down-grading product line and lying about what it does, brother. Having their clientele beta test for em is their downfall. Test themselves then release when ready (really ready) and I don’t see a problem with price point. I certainly didn’t when I purchased Adrenaline. It was after I purchased it I realized I got hosed.

[Jerry Hofmann]

When I bought my first Avid it cost 64k (called a Composer One I think) and did less than iMovie does today. But it was a paradigm shift. I owned one of the first ever shipped. Because of being an early adopter, I knew most of the original employees personally. I think there were less than 30 of them in 1989. As I recall the actual president of the company took my order… By 1999 they were ruling the roost of post production world wide.

But then came FCP.

Tom O’Hanian was an editor at the time he co-founded Avid in the mid/late 80’s.A few years after FCP’s release, I saw Tom at NAB and had heard that he left Avid. I asked him why and we happened to be standing between the Avid and Apple booths when they were across the hall from each other blasting audio levels competing for the ears of all…

Tom said he had to make a difference and they just didn’t listen to him anymore. I said what was it that you wanted them to do? He pointed at Apple’s booth, and said “That”. He knew years ago that they had to adapt or they would slowly go away, or at least, diminish.

The company had the world by the tail, and just plain let it go. Too bad too, after all, they had more to do with the emergence of NLE technology than anybody. Apple just made it affordable, and now pretty much dominates the pro world of editing. Apple has 1.5 million+ REGISTERED users. I think there were something like 80k Avid users in 1999…

It was price/performance that allowed it to happen, and Avid just didn’t react well to it. In LA, NYC, Paris, London, Rome, we’ll see Avid NLEs for a while longer, their News Cutter will live as long as news stations do, but even they will go by the wayside if the Internet’s promise of every media of any kind on any subject is available at a reasonable price. Heck every TV I saw last week in Best Buy is becoming Internet ready… Why watch the 6 PM news if you can get it as it happens on your big flat panel? But I think Tim is right about what they need to do now, but they have this stupid idea that the “high end” crowd sets them up as something special. If they want numbers, they’d better start catering the the larger market that actually makes up those numbers.

Software doesn’t make edit decisions… people do. If the tools are as good or good enough, and they are a considerably less expensive, the vast majority of people will chose the value. So far, FCP, Vegas, Adobe have just creamed Avid, and the reaction from Avid is tepid at best. Avid’s got a lot of technology though that is proprietary to them… but Tom’s departure was very telling for me anyway. As an FCP trainer, I see Avid people all the time in my classes because the market for them has been and may well continue to shrink to nada…

Here in Denver I can count on one hand the number of companies using Avid products now. There are several hundred companies here BTW. Most all of them use FCP. I’ll venture to guess that this is pretty much the way it is in all markets everywhere, less so in LA, NY, etc… only because the cost of the real estate is so high, that the extra money for the bragging rights makes an Avid an ok purchase. Or you are one of the rare few that actually need robust media management, and Unity…

In Hollywood, Avid editors are all taking FCP classes I hear. Vegas and Premiere haven’t really penetrated the mainstream professional world like FCP did for whatever reason…

I ran Avid’s from 1989 until around 2000. I loved them. I was on their beta team, (even alpha team early on) so even had some say in how the software was developed. But in 1999, Avid wanted about $30,000 for a Meridian board set when you could get a “CineWave” at the time that did as much for less than 6k… I jumped to FCP and never looked back. Even with all the freebees I got from Avid, it didn’t offset the total cost of running one. My last one cost $105,000. My first FCP bay cost about 20k, and did most of what I needed it to do. It changed my whole lifestyle in fact.

That story is much the same everywhere when you don’t need the things that granted, Avid does better (and the vast majority of users simply don’t need these things). But there are things in FCP that are FAR better too. Like ergonomics. It’s a ton faster to edit on FCP than it ever was on the Avids I ran, and as long as there’s modes in Avid it will remain to be the situation. That is more important to me (and most users out there) than better media management any day. It’s obvious this is the truth of the situation: just look at the number of registered users.

I was lucky enough to have the ears of the original people, and the high level developers over the years I ran Avid, so didn’t encounter the arrogant attitude that developed in the culture there much. It’s still there I hear from people, so that too doesn’t serve them very well either.

Jerry

Apple Certified Trainer, Producer, Writer, Director Editor, Gun for Hire and other things.

8-Core 3.0 Intel Mac Pro, Dual 2 gig G5, AJA Kona SD, AJA Kona 2, Huge Systems Array UL3D, AJA Io HD, 17″ MBP, Matrox MXO2 with MAX Cinema Displays

[Scott Carnegie]

Thanks Tim, I have a clearer idea of what you are stating now.

I actually have brought this up to Avid before, since I rarely hear their name mentioned on podcasts like the DV show and Digital Production Buzz and it sounded like they might look at a sponsorship of some kind. perhaps I will bring it up again. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, I think that marketing is where Avid falls short.

http://www.MediaCircus.TV
Media Production Services
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada