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FCS 3 is back on sale through Apple – via telesales only
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Craig Seeman – “Jobs was not hands on on the micromanagement level.”
I don’t think thats right. remember the story about him ringing up vic gundothra on a sunday about the shade of yellow in the google logo as it appeared in the iphone app?
Jobs was manically focused on the craziest small details of everything. I think that was part of his force of will – you never knew where he would land. There was another quote recently where someone said that everyone was always preparing to pitch to steve, preparing their boss to pitch to steve, or preparing their bosses boss to pitch to steve. He constructed a pretty flat hierarchy that left him exposed to nearly all decision making.
even in the case of the thing FCPX you can bet there were completely gruelling demo presentations to jobs, where he would presumably crucify them over a drop shadow, or the operation of the precision editor, as is his wont. What he saw in the end satisfied him.
I think he really meant it when he said in the email “its going to be awesome” Steve Jobs thought it was awesome. There are editors who would disagree with him there tho.But he thought the resulting product was awesome. And lets face it, he would have been the one to instruct them to design it for mobile at the outset. Its like that interesting point your man chioni made – its an editing app heavily favouring one handed keyboard operation. I saw a lot of heads nod at that observation. Apple had very long term goals with this app. It is certain that there are considerations made with regard to touch based operation in the future, given that the future of computing, in apple’s universe, is touch based.
And much and all as all that is actually really interesting, it hasn’t stopped FCPX turning into the Pepé le Pew of editing systems in the here and now. The degree to which FCPX is dead in broadcast, hollywood and education was palpable on that panel. As the man says: you can piss off some of the people some of the time, but you really can’t piss off all of the people all of the time.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
[Jamie Franklin] “And a totally delicious admission to failure…”
[Craig Seeman] “What an odd view of “failure.” An EOL product being sold at full price and they’re being snapped up. HP wishes they had that kind of “failure” with their discontinued tablet.”
I think that Apple has absolutely done the right thing in re-releasing FCS3, but I think I see where Jamie’s coming from: if your new product is a success, you shouldn’t be able to sell the product it replaced at full original retail.
The TouchPad analogy makes this an interesting conversation. HP’s TouchPad wasn’t worth $400 when it still had HP’s backing — but EOL’ed, and with the future of the webOS platform in serious doubt, it sold so fast at $99 that HP has (puzzlingly) announced another production run.
Compare this with FCS3, which is EOL and selling at full price to studios who won’t buy FCPX today at a fraction of that price.
I also agree with Craig that Shake’s EOL was much more elegantly handled. If I recall correctly, when Apple EOL’ed Shake, they dropped the price from $3,000 to $500 and continued to sell it for a couple years.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
Do anybody knows of any company that has purchased more than one FCPX license?
Rafael -
Craig –
What does this do to your theory about licensing issues causing the sudden demise of FCP7? If they had such issues how does selling limited versions of FCP7 not cause a problem, and if there are no issues then why did they EOL FCP7 so suddenly?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Aindreas Gallagher] ” …he really meant it when he said in the email “its going to be awesome” Steve Jobs thought it was awesome.”
Hi
At the time everybody zoomed in on Steve’s “awesome” quote.
This is from the MacSoda article that broke this story:
Mr. Jobs answered the three …questions that all video enthusiasts have been wondering aimlessly.
1) Does Apple care about Final Cut?,
2) Who were the Final Cut employees who got fired?,
3) Will the next release be any good?“We certainly do. Folks who left were in support, not engineering. Next release will be awesome.”
Those definitely were the answers we wanted to hear.
Its really question 2 that was the crucial one.
How many Apple ‘support’ people does it take to understand the industry, keep the software engineers on track. To understand (= write) the Manual for Final Cut Pro 1-7?I suspect those were the guys who were sacked. 🙁
Superfluous to Apple’s ongoing strategy 2010 on…So no. I don’t think Steve understood much about ‘editing’ beyond iMovie.
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I know one company that bought 30 licenses but aren’t using any for paid work. I suspect it’s something for staff to learn in the hopes that it becomes professionally useful.
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He doesn’t need me to defend him, but I agree with Craig’s analysis of this situation. Apple saw it was leaving money on the table by not letting big customers grab additional seats of FCS3. The reinstatement is aimed to do these things:
Satisfy the broadcast pros who need to buy more seats of FCS3 because X is not a good fit for their mode of operation. Apple needed to build back some goodwill they foolishly burned off, from the community/market that gave their product it’s original professional street credibility in the market space.
Stop some of the PR bleeding from the foolish way the EOL was initially handled. Show a little flexibility to and sympathy for customers, by taking more of their money.
Take some of the energy out of the current Rival Adobe and Avid marketing that is using this stumble as a way to poach FCP clients away from Apple.
I agree that this move is a couple of months late, but I imagine there was some confusion, and indecision at Cupertino lately in advance of Jobs’ stepping down. Indescision paralysis while waiting for Tim to greenlight the move, I would surmise.
By doing the sales by phone only, they can kill it again at will when the time is more propitious, without making it quite so public.
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I was talking about your little ‘touchpad” gem…/eyeroll
I know who this is for…it’s more obvious than deep fried butter on a stick being not so good for you…I didn’t need a wall of text
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[Paul Dickin] “I don’t think Steve understood much about ‘editing’ beyond iMovie.”
Me neither. On the other letting interface disaster like secondary storylines happen is very unlike him.
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Studio is the superior product, but given it’s age, EOL, and how they handled Shake, yes, I think it reeks of pure greed and another eye poke to sell it at it’s original pricing…it should be 300-500. And come with a hand written note by Randy apologizing for his travel video software and a pledge to release studio in 64bit. And a 299$ rebate… 😀
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