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More Napkin Numbers? (FCPX Units)
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Franz, the 2m FCP number came from a public Apple preso. I misunderstood your first post, and thought you were saying the article said 2m FCPX, when it was Mountain Lion. I get it now.
Chris, I like your “guesstimate multiplier” 12m napkin number because it’s close to my 10m napkin number. LOL
But to carry our Scientific Method Saturday Funfest forward, my postulation remains that FCPX has made an insane amount of money. I’m now back to being unwilling to back down from my original position, that Apple has netted, and quite possibly grossed, more from the first year of FCPX than in the first decade plus of FCP/FCS, at least partly because I haven’t seen the first reason to do so…and I’m also kind of an a-hole….
The thing to keep in mind is that there are people paid a lot more than you and me whose sole job is to make sure we never figure this out. Which is what makes this so fun.
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Dialog that happens in my head.
(Regular Person) “I’m happy”
(Expert) “No you’re not.”
(Regular Person) “But I feel happy”
(Expert) “That’s because you don’t know any better”
(Regular Person) “But why does that matter, they’re my feelings?”
(Expert) “Well some of us are simply more sophisticated about the human feelings game”
(Regular Person) “But why should that matter to me?”
(Expert) “Because if you’re happy when I feel that you shouldn’t be, it reflects poorly on me.”
(Regular Person) “Oh… Sorry.”
(Expert) “Don’t worry, just keep listening to me and I’ll gladly show you how to change.“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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I dont have anything smart to add to this post but Ill do my best.
Ive had two classes avg 12 students for FCPX.
At the start of the course avg 3 people owned a copy.
By mid course it grew to 6.
I just got word that all of them now own a copy. -
Just two things to keep keep in mind from my perspective.
First, the app store changed everything about profitability in business software sales.
Driving ALL the supply chain costs out of a purchase is the truly transformational deal here.
The next unescapable reality to keep in mind is that Apple has a zillion things on the App Store priced between .99 and $80.
And ONE thing priced at $300.
Now to my thinking, $300 is a bit much for an “impulse purchase” but I suspect that for some well-heeled experimenters and business users, that’s precisely what it represents. An impulse purchase. For legions more, it represents a reasonable hedge against not participating (or at least examining) the next wave in the ever growing field of general purpose video editing.
The key is that Apple intelligently vastly lowered both the price and accessibility barriers to purchase – and, to my thinking, that’s the huge business school lesson here.
Even if X had failed, it could easily have been chalked up to a reasonable business experiment under the banner of “can we sell high dollar items via a click and pay software delivery model?”
THAT question has been fully answered no matter what the X gross sales numbers might be.
FWIW.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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What would knowing the number of FCPX unit sales really tell us?
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 -
[Walter Soyka] “What would knowing the number of FCPX unit sales really tell us?”
Exactly the number of purchases?
😉
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Walter,
Agreed – it’s of vague value (though I’d like to know, it doesn’t really impact on assessing the tool).
On the other hand it seems to have been a point of interest and speculation over the past months – Craig Seeman in particular has been interested and I think his numbers were used as a reference point for others. So far none of the comments here (including his) have addressed the 600K calculation from Dec, though it was arrived at with the same method.
Franz.
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[Franz Bieberkopf] “Agreed – it’s of vague value (though I’d like to know, it doesn’t really impact on assessing the tool).”
Wow, I certainly never meant to give the impression that I thought it was of any value whatsoever. LOL If you visit the COW’s Film History & Appreciation forum (AND YOU SHOULD) you’ll see many of my posts dissecting TV ratings, movie grosses and all kinds of other numbers for no reason than that I think it’s fun.
At BEST, numbers like this, and how people feel about those numbers, can tell you something about the audience, but precisely zero about the thing itself.
That’s actually where I think that the sales numbers discussion heated up around X. I got the feeling that some people were hoping to show that Apple had passed up the gold mine that was The Legend of FCP in favor of a bunch of pocket change chumps. I’ve made my case that Apple hands are bleeding from carrying the bags of FCPX money relative to the ceiling that The Legend of FCP was fast approaching.
Ironically, this is the exact inverse of the demand for numbers a few years back, where FCP-ers turned to sales of The Legend of FCP as validation of their choice in NLE. Maybe it’s the same thing then – hoping for pitiful sales of FCPX as a validation of their belief that Apple made a colossally wrong move, and that they should have kept showing me the same kind of love, the same kind of way because that’s how I loved THEM.
Which also speaks to my first point. Numbers won’t tell you much, if anything, about the thing being measured. Merely its reception, and with a little more thought, seeing the audience’s feeling about how they’ve received it.
Or, re: FCPX, you can ignore the numbers and just read this forum. LOL Plenty of fun to be had, maybe even moreso in the absence of hard facts.
Tim Wilson
Vice President, Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW Magazine
Twitter: timdoubleyouThe typos here are most likely because I’m, a) typing this on my phone; and b) an idiot.
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Two millions licenses sold, now we only have to find where the users are.
Through internete i know there are people using it but haven´t meet them yet in real life.
rafael -
What I’d be curious to know is how the X numbers correlate to sales of the “daughter” apps associated with it — Compressor and Motion.
Do people who buy FCX complete the suite?
jPo
“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.
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