Conspiracy or Stupidity?

[Scott Thomas]

[Bret Williams] “If a company could have that power over Apple, it would be Adobe. And Apple could have cared less. It almost seems like Apple has dared Adobe to pull it’s apps. So I don’t see them worried about Smoke, etc. They certainly aren’t going to sell more Mac pros with either the conspiracy or stupidity, so it must be stupidity. These are the people that brought us the cube, the hockey puck mouse, and the original MacBook air.”

I don’t think the exchange between Apple and Autodesk is adversarial. I think to Apple, having them port Smoke and AutoCAD over is a huge win. Apple gives a little ground to have a large developer bring over some of their biggest products.

While I think Adobe and Avid may benefit, I don’t think they were in Apple’s mind.

When I look back on the history of the Final Cut Studio, I see it as a response to Avid and Adobe’s move away from the Mac to Windows in the late 90’s. Avid was unhappy with the direction Apple was going with Copland and basically told Apple that they weren’t going to code for it. They then ported Media Composer to Windows and pushed that. Adobe was moving their app development to prioritize Windows. There are other Apple-Adobe spats like the one over Display Postscript and Flash. Remember when Quicktime had Flash built into it? That ended about the same time Adobe bought Macromedia.

[Peter Wiley]

[Phil Hoppes] “you first have to be willing to create new markets and be willing, if necessary, to “eat your own” in order to make the next leap in volume sales.”

Of course. My point is that if this is what Apple intend (and you may not be far off the mark) they are going about it in an odd way. At the moment FCP X isn’t being marketed in a way that seems intended to make a market. Apple know how to do this — they did it with FCS/FCP and, ironically, now may be abandoning that market they made while trading on it with the new software.

What they might have done is focus on users rather than the product itself or features. The story might have gone something like this:

“In 2005 YouTube changed the world of video by giving more people than ever before a way to place their work before an audience. As a result of the digital revolution that Apple has helped along with products like iMovie and FCP, today there are more kinds of motion pictures made by more kinds of producers than ever before — from Hollywood to the backwoods. There are more kinds of workflows than ever before. The only thing certain is this revolutionary environment is change. Final Cut X has been designed from the ground up as a scalable, customizable video editing platform to work for you no matter how you work or what you produce.”

Note this about the needs of the people who will use the product. Here FCP X is not the or a revolution, it’s the essential tool for the revolution. Of course it’s not the approach they took. If they had, people might be a little more willing to wait to see what’s really going to happen.

Maybe I would have hired Bob Garfield, former ad critic at AdAge to be the spokesperson for the product vision https://www.vimeo.com/6873200 He’d be great at this.

[Brad Davis] “It’s easy to slap the iMovie on Steriods on it right now but I think it’s a little more complex than that.”

Indeed.

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[Dave Johnson]

Excellent post, Phil.

Thanks for taking the time to articulate the exact things I’ve been debating in mind ever since it became obvious a couple years ago that development for all parts of the Final Cut suite was being gradually abandoned … coincidentally, of course, right as the iPod/iPhone market started to skyrocket. All things considered, it would be counter-intuitive for Apple to serve the relatively tiny “pro” market and, since they obviously realized that many years ago, the only issue I have with the whole thing is the ongoing bait and switch tactics.