Chris Kenny
Forum Replies Created
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[Craig Seeman] “Relating to IE, browser, the web, actually IE (and Microsoft) is very much a demon in this.”
And by delaying progress on the web, i.e. a cross-platform ecosystem, Microsoft kept ecosystem advantages concentrated on Windows, making it more difficult for competing operating systems to get anywhere. In other words, what Microsoft did with IE didn’t just hold back the web, it held back personal computing in general.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Craig Seeman] “If Avid sits still, they’re going to be finished sooner or later. The question for me is do MC/Symphony have some value in the market? Of course maybe if some see it as shrinking value it may well simply go away.”
The big question is, are Media Composer and Symphony still products that can attract new users at a rate at least sufficient to replace users who switch to other NLEs or decide they’d rather grow organic heirloom tomatoes than edit video? And I mean real new users, not FCP 7 defectors — to the extent that occurs it’s a one-time bonus, not a path to long-term viability.
I just have trouble seeing it. About the only new editors I can imagine adopting Avid’s tools are film school students who buy into the “It’s more professional” angle. That’s a market, but I don’t think it’s much of one, numerically. Some established post houses might slowly add new seats, but traditional post houses are one of the top ten dying industries, so that’s not exactly a growth opportunity. What’s more, Avid’s traditional pricing on MC/Symphony is clearly unsustainable in a world where FCP X is $300 and many get Premiere ‘for free’ because it comes with a copy of Creative Suite they’d have bought anyway. So as bad as things are now, these product lines could be looking at significant revenue declines.
[Craig Seeman] “If Avid rights the ship it may include a consolidation of MC/Symphony and that may be the plan with the current Symphony crossgrade upgrade.”
Yeah, they’d be crazy not to consolidate.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “How internet explorer has oppressed me for the last 13 years I don’t quite see. I must be missing something.”
Windows has sat astride the industry for most of the last 20 years, effectively suppressing platform-level innovation. Microsoft’s ecosystem advantages were too vast for competitors to make significant headway. A variety of factors eventually weakened these advantages, most notably a) much of the value in personal computing for average users moving from native Windows apps to the cross-platform web (though Microsoft delayed this by capturing the browser market and allowing IE to stagnate for years) and b) competitors building up ecosystems in other markets (e.e. mobile phones) that are now transferring to some extent to products that compete with Windows PCs in some segments a bit more directly (e.g. iPad vs. netbooks).
At the same time we’ve also seen hardware advances begin to reach a tipping point where everything is so powerful that users are starting to favor portability over maximum performance, and Internet bandwidth in many countries begin to reach a point were a variety of previously impractical cloud services are now suddenly practical for many people.
The result is a personal computing market that’s more fluid than it has been in 20 years, i.e. more fluid than it has been during almost the entire lifespan of widely adopted digital NLE software. Because pro video is a little more performance-intensive than average consumer use the impact of this on our market will likely trail its impact on the consumer market by a couple of years, but our whole industry fundamentally rests on top of mass-market platforms. Change is coming, whether we want it or not.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Herb Sevush] “apple? microsoft? standard oil? OK, I give up. Who?”
Err… is it really necessary to specify that Microsoft is the industry’s traditional monopolist? They were legally convicted and everything.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Michael Gissing] “13 years may seem like a long time but I think people over estimate the rate of change or more importantly the nature of change.”
The last 13 years don’t provide a very good guide to the next 13, because the personal computer industry has spent most of the last 13 years largely under the thumb of an oppressive monopoly. That’s starting to draw to a close, and we’re already seeing an explosion of new form factors, interaction mechanisms, software distribution methods, business models, etc.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jules bowman] “Well, aside from the fact that at the moment it is a buggy bit of software that has dispensed with an ‘editing paradigm’ used by the majority of the professional industry and it has been superseded by PP because its 10th incarnation needs ‘a bit of time’ whereas PP just evolves sensibly and that”
FCP X is a ground-up rewrite. It’s more sensibly treated as a new app trying to break into the market (with a fair bit of success so far, based on available data) than a “10th incarnation [that] needs ‘a bit of time'”. The claim that it has been “superseded by PP” does not appear to be remotely true in terms of adoption. As I noted previously, my company has yet to even have someone inquire about bringing us a project edited in Premiere. Neither PP nor FCP X has yet superseded FCP 7.
[Jules bowman] “its adopters are fanboys who will, with all due respect, never make an impact on people’s perceptions of the apps ‘pro’ status when put on the front cover of Apple Monthly no matter whether they make a living from it.”
Even assuming FCP X presently isn’t seeing any use at the high-end (which doesn’t appear to be strictly true — Leverage, etc.), you seem to be entirely ignoring the fact that change is usually bottom-up in this industry. In other words, mid-range adoption today probably translates into high-end adoption down the road.
[Jules bowman] “FC10 is a flawed buggy non-industry standard, non skill set transferable patchwork of a piece of software that appears to corrupt and destroy work rather capriciously giving its competition, who are already ahead of it, 3 to 5 more years head start to claim FCP7s market share and respect.”
Yeah, I’m sure it’ll take Apple at least five years to fix a couple of rare bugs with file saving. And we all know that no other NLE has ever had any bugs that could cause people to lose work. I mean, Adobe in particular is well known for making completely bug-free software that nobody ever complains about.
Oh, wait. That’s crazy. Many of the early performance/reliability issues with FCP X have already been addressed, there isn’t an NLE on the market I’d actually consider rock solid, and people complain constantly about buggy Adobe software — it’s a running joke in the Mac community. Here’s a whole blog dedicated to Adobe bugs. You want some data loss? How about Flash deleting files when it encounters a save error. Somehow I don’t think Premiere will be magically immune to this sort of thing.
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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 north] “Sure. I guess the fan-boys can just wait around for them to get their act together. Everybody else will move on.”
That doesn’t appear to be an accurate characterization of what’s happening. Apple has already plugged most of the major functionality gaps that existed in 10.0.0. FCP X already appears to be rather popular. And while there aren’t any world-famous editors talking it up yet, there are now high-end users one can point to in order to validate that FCP X can be a useful part of high-end workflows. There isn’t really much reason to expect an overall erosion of NLE market share, and the data we have, while sparse, seems to indicate there hasn’t been one.
Will Apple take a short-term hit in some market segments? Maybe, but compared with what baseline? Compared to a universe in which Apple had shipped a release with 10.0.4’s functionality 12 months earlier? OK, but what software company wouldn’t be doing better if its product development were 12 months ahead of where it presently is? Compared to a universe where Apple shipped an NLE with a more conventional interface? Perhaps, but though some established editors might find it awkward there are some real benefits to Apple’s new approach that could help with attracting and retaining new users — and a product that effectively attracts and retains new users probably has better long-term prospects even if it loses some of the old guard in the process.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I guess I simply can’t project what my career is going to look like in 13 years, let alone what gear I’m using. Perhaps that’s something I should try and figure out.
I guess I am trying to tackle the bigger problem, and I am generally curious for my own knowledge.
If trust with Apple has run its course, is there an entity you feel more comfortable dealing with?”
IMO the whole computer industry — i.e. the firmament on which the NLE market presently rests — is going to change radically over the next 13 years. Far more so than over the last 13. Pro video editing could mostly be done on 70″ touch screens running distant relatives of iOS, or by poking at empty space while wearing Google-branded augmented reality glasses. It’s crazy to try to make plans with respect to specific markets or products across the shakeup that’s already starting in personal computing.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Walter Soyka] “I don’t quite understand what you’re getting at here. You’re suggesting there are lessons to be learned from the “wider world of editing,” right? What are they?”
I was making a somewhat different point. The specific lesson of these numbers, I think, is “Just because a narrative (about e.g. FCP X’s failure) dominates Internet discussion of a subject doesn’t necessarily mean that narrative has any relationship to reality”.
But to sort of address your point, I think there’s massive value in FCP X being designed to encompass a wider market than pro NLEs might have traditionally targeted. There’s a notion commonly floated here that software designed primarily for high-end specialty markets is inherently going to be better for people in those markets. But the history of computing furnishes numerous examples of the opposite. Larger markets tend to generate more total revenue than specialty markets, allowing for investment of more developer resources. Larger markets tend to be more competitive, driving innovative new features. They tend to be more diverse, driving flexibility. And they tend to contain less expert users, driving usability.
There is, in fact, a very strong historical tendency (with hardware as well, actually) for mass-market products to annihilate specialty market products when they come into direct contact. Apple’s “mass market first” approach to FCP X is has been widely perceived as a weakness for the product, a reason for high-end users to avoid it and to mistrust its future. But I see a fairly recent analogy between FCP X and Avid (to a lesser extent even Premiere) that suggests precisely the opposite — iPhone vs. BlackBerrry in the enterprise.
Four years ago, the narrative about iPhone in the enterprise was much like the narrative about using FCP X for high-end work today. It was missing basic enterprise management features! It was a consumer toy! Meanwhile, off in the consumer market, the iPhone was winning over a lot of fans — people who’d never previously owned a smartphone of any kind. It was also building a massive ecosystem around itself. As Apple began to add enterprise features, a lot of the iPhone’s new fans started demanding to use them as work phones — and a lot of existing enterprise users saw that value in iPhone’s ecosystem.
The same is likely to happen with FCP X. Effective tools and workflows will likely develop around it simply because of how widely used it is. People who learn on FCP X now will want to take it with them if (when) they move upmarket later — and it’s already well on its way to building out a feature set that will let them do so. While Avid is off “focusing on the enterprise”, the army Apple is presently building in the mid-range market is going to be slowly marching toward the world’s post facilities.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.
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[Juan Morales] “My prediction: within now and 1 year, Avid will be bought by Grant Petty/Blackmagic…
Anyone thinks the same?!?”
Are we talking about the whole company, or the video division? If the latter, the main thing that makes me question this is whether Blackmagic would want the tech. In terms of internals (rendering engine, video I/O, etc.) they’ve got a solid foundation already in Resolve, and in terms of user interface Media Composer is a twisty labyrinth that’s only comfortably navigable to people who’ve spent years learning its myriad passages. Buying Media Composer seems like it would mostly be about buying a user base. But the user base in question is slowly shrinking, and the main reason it’s not shrinking faster is because of a conservatism that would make it very hard for anyone who bought the product to quickly transition users to a product with more mass market (and — critically — new user) appeal.
If we’re talking about the whole company, I’d imagine such an acquisition would be more about the audio side of things.
Also, Blackmagic being a privately held company (as far as I can tell) it’s hard to see if the financials of such a deal would be at all plausible.
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Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.