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in the continuing series of things read on art of the guillotine..
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “refused to confirm *anything at all*
the state of XML, the clip viewer, EDLs, OMF – that is what I find both ridiculous and annoying.
Its not a bloody iphone protoype, its the software we use to make a living.”As someone who has worked with developers, they have good reason not to confirm things. How things work in their final form may or may not be as they are now.
It’s the software Apple sells to make a living as well and there’s a lot at stake for them financially. They’re not a “mean spirited business” who’s goal is to annoy it’s user base. They are a business and for good and standard reasons (and they are standard reasons) they will not discuss certain things.
Your desire does not trump their business. In June you will be able to make a sound decision and I suspect Apple has some confidence in the long run about this. In fact, given the changes they seem to be making, they are an extremely confident company. Much more so than Avid or Adobe (personal opinion there).
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “Is there a brute financial imperative in this kind of ridiculous behaviour?
“YES!
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In between the brutal scepticism of the disgruntled camp, the despair of the headless chickens, and the happy-clappy cheerleading of the Apple optimists, there is surely a likelihood that a) at the very least FCPX won’t be a disaster with loads of interesting and innovative stuff to sink our teeth into (especially if you’re not already familiar with iMovie, but a good deal else as well that no-one knows anything about), b) there will be lots of thing not right with it on day one which means many of us won’t be able to use it until these are addressed, and c) Apple made a pretty lousy fist of their “sneak peak” which is a bit odd for a company so expert in this kind of thing (but then maybe they misjudged their audience somewhat).
Whatever, all this colourful difference of opinion makes for a great forum to follow 😉
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “for my part I’m not satisfied with the way apple have gone about this, the highly selective release of information and the refusal to answer any questions at the event or after. I’m annoyed. Its a ridiculous way to carry on with a professional customer base.”
Virtually all companies are highly selective about what information they release, and companies rarely provide answers to questions posed by random people in Internet forums, especially if they’re already planning formal produce announcements that provide such answers (which is almost certainly the case here).
People in this instance appear to be confused and upset by perfectly routine corporate behavior, and are reading all sorts of unlikely things into it.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “and c) Apple made a pretty lousy fist of their “sneak peak” which is a bit odd for a company so expert in this kind of thing (but then maybe they misjudged their audience somewhat).”
They’ve never done a sneak peek for any product before that I know of. Apple’s marketing strategy has been changing every since Jobs started responding to emails from the public, as far as I can tell. This is new territory for them.
First was Jobs “awesome.” Then was Larry Jordan’s “Jaw Dropping.” Then Apple shows some awesome jaw dropping features. They’ve never proceeded like this before that I know of. They’ve been criticized for complete silence so they take steps over the last year or so to change that and now they get criticized for not saying enough. Rather than seeing this as a company examining and improving the very tightly managed release of information, they’re blasted for it by some people. They’re making misjudgments but this is not something they’ve done before.
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m not talking about the beta or slipping shipping dates: apple reps, in response to direct questions after the event, refused to confirm *anything at all*
the state of XML, the clip viewer, EDLs, OMF – that is what I find both ridiculous and annoying.
Its not a bloody iphone protoype, its the software we use to make a living.”Come on. You know how this works. The product isn’t even formally announced yet. There are significant technical, competitive, PR, and even legal reasons to not let your developers go around handing out arbitrary information about unannounced products.
Really, it seems to me that everyone’s complaints could have been addressed if Apple had just waited for a full, formal product announcement. For all that people are claiming that Apple dropped the ball by not releasing enough information, the message they’re actually sending is “Don’t give any more sneak peeks; if you won’t tell us everything, we’d prefer to know nothing at all”. Personally, I would rather know something than nothing, I saw this “sneak peek” as an encouraging step toward openness in this market, and I hope Apple is ignoring all of the people complaining about it, because if they’re not, their response is going to be to never offer this kind of early preview again.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.
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Yup, they haven’t done it before and they didn’t do it terribly well, given they were speaking to a worldwide audience of professional (and not so professional) editors), who had reasons good and less good for expecting it to be better. It’s perfectly OK to accept the possibility of this without the sky falling in around you!
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
Apple made some mistakes. The sky is not falling. Unfortunately many people on this forum can’t see that.
I can only speculate that Apple assumed (wrongly) that they are not in a position to reveal all. They probably thought it was self evident in “sneak peek” to a User’s Group rather than a formal Press Conference for a product announcement.
Apple probably didn’t anticipate that they’d actually have to tell people that there is more to come, that they can’t talk about certain things at THIS STAGE and there would be a formal product announcement around the time of the release. They might have thought this was COMMON SENSE when talking to people who were PROFESSIONALS in their field, some of whom may have had previous interaction with developers.
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I think they were very naive if they didn’t foresee the attention this event would attract and how every detail of it would be pored over by the FCP community – but at the same time I do agree it is unreasonable to expect them to have answered some of the questions that are being asked of them here.
Overall, they’d probably have done better in this case to have kept their powder dry but I can understand the market pressures that made them decide to do it. I can’t help feeling that on balance their mistake was to have treated their FCP client base just the same way as they treat the consumer client base – a little too much showbusiness, a little too short on substance. Generally most of us like, and need, facts and figures and details. I hope they learn this presentation lesson for next time.
Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “I can’t help feeling that on balance their mistake was to have treated their FCP client base just the same way as they treat the consumer client base – a little too much showbusiness, a little too short on substance.”
I don’t see that at all. A consumer product never would have gotten a “sneak peek” in the first place — they’d have stayed completely silent about it until somewhere between two weeks and about an hour before it was going to ship, and then had a full, formal product announcement. This is what Apple does with consumer products. Virtually the only exceptions are for platform products that developers need to get their hands on before shipment (OS X and iOS releases) and for products where coordination with external companies makes secrecy impossible.
The sneak peek was Apple deciding to treat pros differently, and give them a little preview of what was coming, trusting that this audience could be relied on to understand the limited release for early information in the proper context. That trust was evidently misplaced.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read What is FCP X’s relationship to iMovie? on our blog.
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