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Risk and failure
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[Richard Boyd] “I currently have 55 seats of FCS7 in 2 different editing labs for my students. I was planning on updating this fall to the new version of FCP that we have been anticipating. Aside from all of the other issues, attempting to set up 55 different I-Tunes accounts so that we can individually download 55 different copies of FCX is absurd beyond the ken of mortal man.
So, we are considering our options – best guess we will probably move to Adobe PP. And guess what – our students will train on Adobe, buy Adobe, use Adobe, convince their friends to use Adobe, etc. We train 200 or so students a year. Multiply us by dozens of different schools and a few years, and you know what – you have a pretty wide impact on the future of the NLE market.”
Apple has already announced that volume/education licensing will be addressed. Yes, they may lose some sales this year as a consequence of not having this sorted at launch, but I doubt it’ll be statistically significant in the long run.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[David Roth Weiss] “You cannot win. Chris Kenny will simply wear you down.”
[David Roth Weiss] “he is relentless in his use of circular reasoning and non sequiturs, which makes any discussion futile. “
David I totally agree. He just doesn’t get it does he.
You have to admire his resilience though . . .
. . . don’t you?
Alex Hawkins
Canberra, Australia -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “I’m also pretty ruthlessly selective in the things I respond to”
[Aindreas Gallagher] “Now when I say hit them on the bonce of course, I actually mean bang my gnats splayed forearms onto the windshield of the apple Audi R8 doing ninety down the future lane highway – god alone knows they can’t actually see us”
Yeah but don’t you see Aindreas. . . You’re funny and witty.
Therein lies the difference.
Alex Hawkins
Canberra, Australia -
[Peter Corbett] “that competition just got a whole lot shorter.”
I find that slightly worrying too. two viable contenders left on the field is not ideal.
http://www.ogallchoir.net
promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics -
This conversation would be so much more fun in a pub. You and I could argue all night long, while Aindreas leads everyone else in song…
I’d be happy to continue to debate you on glossy displays or slots in a Mac Pro, but we run the risk of missing the forest for the trees.
[Chris Kenny] “But you’ll notice I didn’t have to explain your points with ad-hoc one-off explanations. I agree there are systematic explanations. I just disagree about what they are.”
I don’t think we actually disagree about the systemic explanation. I agree with nearly all of your explanations of each of the individual decisions that Apple as made. No one is saying that Apple thinks, “You know what would upset professional users? Spending millions of dollars to buy Shake, and then killing it a couple years later. Let’s do that.”
My main point is Apple’s decisions, taken as a whole, can be reasonably interpreted as inconsistent with a professional market orientation.
Apple’s stance on the Pro Apps was crystal clear 10 years ago: deliver great applications to professionals who will use them in their businesses in order to sell high-margin, top-of-the-line hardware. Apple saw us as a critical market for their continued success, and developed or bought software to entice us to buy their hardware.
Fast-forward to 2011: Apple Computer, Inc. has become Apple, Inc., and the main drivers of their growth are things like iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Apple’s strategy toward professionals has become less consistent over time — like you say, there are still high-end computers and pro features in FCPX — and it’s very reasonable to suggest that the professional market is now of negligible strategic importance to Apple.
Clearly, you believe Apple is still very pro-focused, and I understand your arguments for saying so — but do you believe it’s unreasonable for anyone to suggest that Apple cares less about pros today than they did 10 years ago?
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] “That said, some of the FCPX features which I suspect you think are evidence that Apple cares about the pro market, like 64-bit, multi-threading, and native file support, are table stakes in 2011. “
Wel I guess Avid is in trouble… (not really, but they seem to get a pass for not having all these boxes ticked on their spec sheet)
I also see an interesting theme with all the business analysis going on; that no one is at all concerned with the fact that Avid isn’t making any money. Could it be that Avid’s tight focus on just the tens of hundreds of high-end pros could be just as big a liability as Apple being Apple? For Avid to be profitable, and thus sustainable, they need to make a lot more money off each of their tens of hundreds of users than they do when they have to compete on price with the likes of Apple and Adobe, who can both afford a race to the bottom on NLE pricing since they both make most of their money elsewhere.
Avid will sell a few thousand more copies of MC5.5 the second half of this year than usual, but I don’t see that getting them out of the financial hole they are in. Especially when most of the bump will come from sales at 40% of their usual list price from the crossgrade promotion. Just like we need to wait 6, 9, or 12 months too see where things tend to be headed with FCPX in terms of features, we also need to wait that long to see if Avid is heading in a positive direction financially. Maybe Avid is seeing healthy revenue growth in their other products, I wouldn’t know. I just know what I see on their recent financial statements, and they’re in a bit of a hole in general.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “Fast-forward to 2011: Apple Computer, Inc. has become Apple, Inc., and the main drivers of their growth are things like iPods, iPhones, and iPads. Apple’s strategy toward professionals has become less consistent over time — like you say, there are still high-end computers and pro features in FCPX — and it’s very reasonable to suggest that the professional market is now of negligible strategic importance to Apple.
Clearly, you believe Apple is still very pro-focused, and I understand your arguments for saying so — but do you believe it’s unreasonable for anyone to suggest that Apple cares less about pros today than they did 10 years ago?”
Apple seems to be trying to straddle the prosumer and pro segments with FCPX. Merging FCExpress and FCPro, so to speak. And they finished the FCE features first, since it hits a wider market. If they really do have a deep API, they can still deliver a product that can be very compelling to even the highest-end pros without having to develop for every niche use case themselves. They’ve found that delivering a platform to a hungry market and giving third parties a way to address far more facets of that market than Apple would want to itself is highly successful (see iOS).
This doesn’t forgive yanking FCS2009 off the market, but then again, would there be nearly as much of a feature vacuum for third parties to race to fill if Apple was still distributing FCS2009? Maybe that’s far fetched, and we still need to see that API. So much is still up in the air.
Best,
Andy -
[Walter Soyka] “My main point is Apple’s decisions, taken as a whole, can be reasonably interpreted as inconsistent with a professional market orientation.”
And my point is that Apple is an unusual company in many respects, and commonly does things competitors would never even consider doing in all market segments. You can say this these are inconsistent with the needs of pro customers, but many of Apple’s detractors have argued Apple’s practices are inconsistent with the needs of customers in general, so this doesn’t make a compelling case that Apple treats pro customers unusually poorly. Maybe in this instance Apple’s supposedly poor treatment of customers will actually translate into a negative outcome in the marketplace, but historically that’s not the way to bet.
[Walter Soyka] “Clearly, you believe Apple is still very pro-focused, and I understand your arguments for saying so — but do you believe it’s unreasonable for anyone to suggest that Apple cares less about pros today than they did 10 years ago?”
I think the model of ‘attention’ that such a statement implies is not directly applicable to corporations. And, interestingly, mostly isn’t applied to other corporations. Nobody freaks out that Sony will neglect its pro cameras because the company is selling too many Playstations.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Chris Kenny] “And my point is that Apple is an unusual company in many respects, and commonly does things competitors would never even consider doing in all market segments.”
I’m not talking about what competitors think — I’m talking about what Apple’s current and potential professional users think. A significant chunk of professional users are looking at Apple’s offerings and wondering how you’d think it’s targeted at them.
If your argument is that Apple releases products that they think are good without targeting them at a specific market, then I think it follows logically that Apple is not focused on the professional (or any other) market.
[Chris Kenny] “You can say this these are inconsistent with the needs of pro customers, but many of Apple’s detractors have argued Apple’s practices are inconsistent with the needs of customers in general, so this doesn’t make a compelling case that Apple treats pro customers unusually poorly. “
Consumers and professionals have totally different needs and merit totally different approaches. Secrecy and cool product launches are great with consumers, where hype and “it” factor sell. Not so with professionals who are buying tools to do work and get paid.
[Chris Kenny] “Maybe in this instance Apple’s supposedly poor treatment of customers will actually translate into a negative outcome in the marketplace, but historically that’s not the way to bet.”
Supposedly poor?
There are plenty of professionals for whom FCPX is a good fit. For them, it’s a great new start. You have no disagreement from me here.
There are also plenty of professionals and current FCP users that Apple has apparently chosen to exclude from the target market of the new product, because it doesn’t currently address their needs. For example, people who preview their work on broadcast monitors or post specialists who rely on interchange in post.
I don’t think that FCPX will have a negative outcome in the marketplace. I anticipated this argument from you, and I made a separate post about how FCPX will be a huge seller — but that the market is much, much broader than it was before, and has possibly shifted, excluding a previous subset of FCP’s users.
[Chris Kenny] “I think the model of ‘attention’ that such a statement implies is not directly applicable to corporations. And, interestingly, mostly isn’t applied to other corporations.”
Sure it is. Corporations sell things. The things they sell are targeted to appeal to a group of potential customers. That’s what “attention” is — knowing your market and delivering something attractive to it. Apple does this very well in the consumer space.
FCPX knows its market, and is delivering something to it, too. It’s just not the same set of potential customers that previous versions of FCP was targeted for (though I agree with you that there is a lot of overlap).
[Chris Kenny] “Nobody freaks out that Sony will neglect its pro cameras because the company is selling too many Playstations.”
That’s because Sony continues to deliver products that satisfy their pro customers’ needs. If Sony stopped production of broadcast cameras, HDCAM SR decks, and cinema projectors tomorrow, people would rightly observe that Sony was more focused on consumer electronics.
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] “If your argument is that Apple releases products that they think are good without targeting them at a specific market, then I think it follows logically that Apple is not focused on the professional (or any other) market.”
My argument is more that Apple has very unconventional opinions about what things really matter in various markets, and despite people constantly criticizing Apple for these opinions, or accusing Apple of simply being clueless because they can’t understand Apple’s (rarely articulated) opinions even are based on Apple’s actions, Apple rarely turns out to be wrong.
[Walter Soyka] “Consumers and professionals have totally different needs and merit totally different approaches. Secrecy and cool product launches are great with consumers, where hype and “it” factor sell. Not so with professionals who are buying tools to do work and get paid.”
Most of the arguments along these lines with respect to this market have also historically been made against iPhone/iPad/Mac enterprise adoption. But those products are now doing quite well in enterprise markets. Yes, even the Mac, which is growing ~60% a year in the US enterprise market. Apple’s “take no prisoners” approach to the market does require flexibility, and it’s true that businesses tend to be less flexible. But this approach allows Apple to make more compelling products than its competitors do, so there are competitive advantages for businesses that can be flexible enough to to adopt products from Apple and similarly aggressive vendors, and more and more business are finding ways to accommodate them.
[Walter Soyka] “There are also plenty of professionals and current FCP users that Apple has apparently chosen to exclude from the target market of the new product, because it doesn’t currently address their needs. For example, people who preview their work on broadcast monitors or post specialists who rely on interchange in post.”
Apple has almost certainly not chosen to exclude those users from their long-term (or even relatively short-term) plans for FCP X. They simply didn’t wait on those features for the initial release. People are up in arms because they don’t like the signal that supposedly sends, but I suspect Apple shares my opinion that a year from now, nobody will much care about what signals Apple was believed to be sending with the initial release, if the product meets their needs at that time.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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