Why are you still here? (part 3 in a continuing series)

[Richard Herd]

Same here.

[Steve Connor]

[David Cherniack] “Because, as evidenced by the discussion hereabouts, it’s not “just a piece of software.””

Of course it is, I’m sure carpenters have long and varied discussions about what hammers they use, but and the end of the day it’s still just a hammer.

Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television

[David Cherniack]

[Steve Connor] “Of course it is, I’m sure carpenters have long and varied discussions about what hammers they use, but and the end of the day it’s still just a hammer.”

And by insisting that it’s just a piece of software you’re indulging in ideological thinking, ignoring the data to the contrary, the hundreds of posts that discuss it as revolutionary, landscape changing, the future of the NLE, the virtues of magnetic vs fixed timelines….ad infinitum. The community of hammer users should be so prolific…

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Walter Soyka]

[Steve Connor] “Of course it is, I’m sure carpenters have long and varied discussions about what hammers they use, but and the end of the day it’s still just a hammer.”

I’m not a carpenter, so I can’t construct a meaningful analogy here, but I think it is different.

I just can’t think of any other circumstance where a leading tool manufacturer has replaced a tool with a total redesign that swaths of their existing user base couldn’t use for their work, let alone been rewarded for it.

Bill Davis mentioned “frictionless” as a new business ideal. (Personally, I don’t think it’s new at all — it’s just good old fashioned service with a new name). Professional tool makers traditionally offer frictionless experiences for their customers. Disrupting your own customers like Apple has done could very well be suicide for any other developer, but to David’s point, they are praised for their behavior in some quarters specifically because of who they are and what people believe about them.

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

[Steve Connor]

Ideology- a system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy:

the set of beliefs characteristic of a social group or individual:

2 [mass noun] archaic the science of ideas; the study of their origin and nature.
archaic visionary speculation, especially of an unrealistic or idealistic nature.

[David Cherniack] “And by insisting that it’s just a piece of software you’re indulging in ideological thinking, ignoring the data to the contrary, the hundreds of posts that discuss it as revolutionary, landscape changing, the future of the NLE, the virtues of magnetic vs fixed timelines….ad infinitum. The community of hammer users should be so prolific…
“

I think it’s a bit of a squeeze to call these discussions idealogical

Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television

[Steve Connor]

[Walter Soyka] “but to David’s point, they are praised for their behavior in some quarters specifically because of who they are and what people believe about them.
“

Almost no-one here has praised Apple for their horrendous handling of the FCS3 EOL and those of us who choose to praise FCPX for what it is do so not out of any ideology, but out of the fact the software works for us in practical terms.

Steve Connor
“FCPX Professional”
Adrenalin Television

[David Cherniack]

[Steve Connor] “I think it’s a bit of a squeeze to call these discussions idealogical”

I didn’t. I called the thinking behind many of the posts ‘ideological’. Such thinking also contributes to sloppy (in one nameless case), frame-of- reference-shifting (in some others), rhetoric.

David
AllinOneFilms.com

[Richard Herd]

Have you read Horkeimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment?

[Richard Herd]

[Walter Soyka] “I just can’t think of any other circumstance where a leading tool manufacturer has replaced a tool with a total redesign that swaths of their existing user base couldn’t use for their work, let alone been rewarded for it.”

Whoa. Yesterday I was just thinking I would not post my hammer analogy, but now I will:

I installed floorboards and trim around my house. At first I used a nail gun but it proved too cumbersome for such a small job. So I used a tack hammer instead. That is, the nail gun is an improvement on the tack hammer, but my job was so small I needed to use the other tool, the less complex tool.

I’ll let the ideologues debate whether X is the nail gun or the tack hammer.

[Christian Schumacher]

[Richard Herd] ” Have you read Horkeimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment?”

“Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others,
so that it could all the more surely be made the same”