Tim Wilson
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COW Coins
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Along similar lines, I saw an article last month about Amazon ramping up its plans for SAME DAY delivery. It’s available in some markets already. As a consumer, I’m as giddy as a schoolgirl.
I’m also as giddy as a schoolgirl that I’m not a bricks and mortar retailer or somebody who works at one.
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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Speaking of long movies, Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi” (opening Nov. 21) is going to be 3.14159265359 hours long.
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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“PP6 is also faster than FCP7, because it is 64-bit as well. But not everything is processor-speed, a lot what people here claim as “faster” is quicker turnaround in many workflows, becuase the media-management and editing process are more efficient than what they used before.”
PP6 and FCP 7 may also be “faster” in the sense of “not taking time from paying jobs to bang your head against something suboptimal until it has sufficiently bent you to its will.”
It’s different if X is optimal, or close enough to it, out of the box for you, or you have the time or inclination to with it in. but there’s also something to be said for working with what works for you until it doesn’t. That’s not “fear” or “failure to look forward.” it’s efficiency, and if speed isn’t about efficiency, it’s not worth much more than fun for cheetahs.
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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[Bill Davis] “you young guys, dont’ take that as a blanket endorsement of scatological humor”
In that case, please consider THIS post — or indeed, virtually any post I’ve made thus far — to be a blanket endorsement of scatalogical humor.
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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The question is always what the trademark is marking.
For example, ALL buildings after 1990 are COPYrighted, in that you can’t build something that looks just like them.
Most building TRADEMARK marks only apply to the commercial re-use of those images. There’s no sense in which a public building, including the Empire State Building, can prevent you from using them as a background element. That’s explicitly covered under Fair Use.
And yes, there is quite a bit of case law related to using trademarked buildings, the most famous of which involved the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and significantly narrowed the scope of previous landmark/trademark law. This is nicely covered in the article When A Landmark Cannot Serve As A Trademark.
That said, the list of trademarked buildings is loooong. Pretty much any building you can name. In New York, that includes the Chrysler Building, Flatiron Building, the Apple Store, etc. Remarkably, I can’t find any reference to The Garden being trademarked, and the Stock Exchange only holds a trademark to depictions of the floor.
Seattle’s Space Needle, St. Louis’s arch, San Francisco’s TriMerica building, etc. All trademarked. (Good tip: if it has a company name in it, ie, the Empire State Insurance Company or Chrysler or TriMerica) you can be POSITIVE it’s trademarked.)
Do note that many stock photo and video agencies simply don’t accept submissions that include these buildings at any view much closer than a skyline. But that relates to depictions OF those buildings, NOT to depictions of scenes with those buildings in the background.
There are really very few scenarios in which you’re not okey-dokey…but any advice you get here is worth exactly what you paid for it. 🙂
And to be on the safe side, I’d avoid the Apple store altogether. LOL
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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[Eric Santiago] “Can Autodesk afford Avid? Might as well they have the top three 3D apps under their wing.”
Avid sold Softimage to Autodesk in 2008. Is there something else you’re thinking of?
[Craig Seeman] “Avid, beyond the radical payroll cutting, doesn’t seem to do much beyond incremental changes in their business model.”
I’m not convinced that their business model needs changing. Gross margins are 48.6% – damn good when considered how much they spend to manufacture big hardware products like ISIS and Pro Tools consoles. There are companies, even entire industries, that would kill for this kind of margin. That’s on revenue of $143.7 million in the quarter, which is pretty close to real money.
To phrase it in the form of a question: is it possible for a company to make a profit on 49% of $144 million? Yes, as long as you’re spending less than 51% of $144 million to keep the lights turned on.
Which is what Avid isn’t doing, as seen in their net margin of -24.8%! I’m oversimplifying, but that’s a swing of nearly 75% in the wrong direction.
To become profitable they have to either increase income or cut expenses, or both. For their NLE business anyway, they’re taking exactly the steps you’d WANT them to take in order to increase income: lowering prices, separating software from hardware, opening more dramatically to third parties.
What’s left? Cutting expenses. I’m not a business whiz, but is profit more complicated than making more than you spend?
As I’m thinking about it, though Craig, you’re right to raise a larger question — can you make a profit in THIS market, making THOSE products, on $70-ish million/quarter? The answer may simply be no, it takes more money than that to do what they’re trying to do. I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m not a big fan of stockwatching, but it is worth noting that The Street has Avid as one of 5 tech stocks poised to break out (in a good way). Motley Fool has Avid rated as set to outperform in its sector (by a score of 88 to 45), and twice as many of their top guys give Avid a green thumbs up as give it a red thumbs down (24-12).
Although who the hell knows what they mean by sector? Over at Yahoo, most of the competitors they list are GAMES companies.
Of course we know that there’s no alternate universe where either Apple or Adobe belongs in a list of Avid competitors, but this gets back to my previous post — Avid doesn’t have A core market. It has a dozen of them. Nobody else is trying to reach more than one or two of them.
Anyway, the near-impossibility of making sense of all this is what makes it so much fun to kick around. A whole bunch of MBA students are going to make their bones by using Avid as a case study, and it’s unlikely that any of them will come to the same conclusions.
Other than the one about needing to make more than you spend.
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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[Craig Seeman] “I think they should be sold to a company that can integrate their product line into a complimentary line and market base.”
They have 550 products. This is a big part of the problem.
Admittedly, there’s a good number of Pro Tools plug-ins that Avid doesn’t actually develop, but even at the highest level, there’s just too much stuff. Continuing with Digidesign, it isn’t just Pro Tools systems (of which there are more than you think). It’s live mixing, DJ, MIDI controllers. The reference monitors are still in there, so I guess they’re not part of the main M-Audio sell-off, but I haven’t even gotten to Digidelivery or Sibelius music composition software. So in Digi alone, I can see 3 or 4 companies that could buy pieces.
Avid’s video business includes on-air character generators, newsroom automation and newscast control, playout servers, online and nearline shared storage, video and audio studio consoles (TV audio, rather than audio mixing), transmission and distribution automation — it’s a long freaking list that, again, could easily go to 3 or 4 different companies.
And needless to say, we’re talking about a good-sized handful of different and not necessarily related industries.
As hard as they’re getting hit, their market cap at the end of today was $300 million. I know that that’s not a straight correlation to the potential sale price, but how long would it take to return on an investment even half that amount? A quarter? It would take a long time just to wrestle the company down to a manageable size and sell off or kill some of the products and lines to get a little focus.
IMO, the damage that Apple did to Avid had very little to do with FCP bleeding off Media Composer business. It had to do with taking Avid’s eye off the ball. Balls.
Understandable that they wanted to answer competitive challenges, but they spent $80 million CASH for M-Audio, $71 million CASH for Pinnacle that I can’t imagine they returned. There was additional stock in the mix — another $400 millionish based on the then stock price of $62/share. Oops. I have my own reasons for thinking that these were bad ideas, but five months later, the stock was at $35, and has been headed downhill more or less in a straight line since then.
So while it takes money to make money, you can spend an awful lot of money to lose an awful lot MORE money. They’ve basically spent 7 years showing what those parts of the portfolio have been worth even if Avid or a future buyer decides to sell them off.
Of course, maybe as with the Pinnacle consumer business and the heart of the M-audio business, better to throw money-losing ballast overboard to try and keep the ship’s most valuable cargo dry.
Maybe I’m looking at it too hard, but that’s all why it’s hard for me to come up with a couple of realistic paragraphs about how selling the company could actually happen.
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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[Christian Schumacher] “[Richard Herd] “That’s like saying the French Revolution was a failure. ;0″
…And, of course, the revolution led France to Napoleon…”
I’ve observed elsewhere that Apple was like Robespierre, if Robespierre then cut off his OWN head…
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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[Richard Herd] “That means, we’re just waiting for the movie — the one edited in X — that generates the halo effect. “
I think the halo is already there, provided by Apple itself. If you don’t see what you need, no number of features being made can make up for the features you need that are missing.
To put it another way, Cold Mountain was the halo project that some people needed as validation of the faith that they were increasingly putting into FCP. It said to them, “C’mon in, the water’s fine.” For all that the FCPX halo is tarnished for a lot of old users…albeit shining back up for many others…it’s inconceivable to me that, short of giving away ponies or puppies, Apple can possibly make itself more attractive to the extended audience Apple wants to draw in with X.
For the record, I don’t actually believe that Cold Mountain provided that much of a halo. Anybody who took a closer look saw that it was a terribly convoluted workflow that was primarily organized around index cards, Filemaker, and a dedicated crew to wrangle FCP that was bigger than the movie’s entire editing team. Cold Mountain’s workflow was a nightmare, and did a lot to keep FCP AWAY from film production for several more years.
The halo was provided by you folks here in the COW, a far vaster FCP community than every other one combined, who helped each other see that FCP actually worked for the kind of jobs that most people actually do. You helped each other see that it was far more useful for far more work than it was actually even initially intended for. Widespread adoption would have happened even more quickly without Cold Mountain muddying the waters.
As I think about it, I think that some of the same dynamic contributed to the development of X. The Legend of FCP was developed by looking at existing professional nonlinear workflows, and quickly improving them and, more importantly, extending them.
So now Apple was looking at 2 million+ registered users who were extending that extension out even further. The largest part of these users was trying to do things that legacy NLEs were never intended to do, as the notion of “professional video” was exploding.
Yeah, traditional professional production has expanded, but the percentage of legacy NLE-style users has been rapidly shrinking relative to the new nucleus of FCP users for nearly the entire lifespan of The Legend of FCP. To get to the next TEN million users, TWENTY million users, Apple had to extend the extension being pushed by new users who had been enticed by Apple’s original extension to believe that this thing could do anything — which wasn’t remotely true. Apple knew it needed to start actually BEING true.
This is why Apple has so regularly blown up their existing customers to start over. Customers inevitably innovate faster than companies can — but Apple regularly, and understandably, wants to get out in front again, and remarkably, has the brass ovaries to do it.
In The Legend of FCP’s case, they saw customers moving more quickly than their own ability to refine — and in fact refinement had become a mug’s game. That’s why The Legend of FCP had been largely unchanged since 2005. The two biggest features added since then — multicam (2005) and ProRes (2007) — were copies of features that had been around for years (ProRes was virtually identical to Avid DNxHD, introduced 4 years earlier), with very nearly zero added to The Legend in 2009. I don’t think that that little movement qualifies as refinement. It certainly doesn’t count as innovation. YOU were innovating at lighting speed compared to Apple’s increasingly calcified pace.
The only way for Apple to even catch up with YOU, much less to be DRIVING innovation instead of dragging it down, was to throw everything else overboard. Racing against the wind, the most precious cargo becomes ballast.
That’s why I don’t think Apple is looking for a halo project. Look at their website and outbound marketing. The halo is provided by the Apple computer itself. X is just one more cool thing you can do with your new laptop while you’re waiting for Siri to show up. They’ve otherwise all but abandoned the concept.
You know what you’re waiting for, and it’s not based on anyone else doing anything else. You’re way, way past that. You need X do what YOU need it to do, and if you adopt it, it will be far more based on what you read here than in the Hollywood Reporter or at Apple.com, or see in a movie theater.
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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We’ve talked about this in other threads….and talked and talked….and I still haven’t heard the first bit of evidence that this was a mistake FOR APPLE. For any one of you, perhaps, disaster, but I still think that this is already a big win FOR APPLE, and will turn out to be an even more massive win FOR APPLE as time goes by.
Look, there’s no company that has been more capricious, if not crueler, to its customers. It has regularly burned its current customer base to the ground in order to clear the way for the customer base it actually wants — and the customers it has and the customers it wants have often had very little overlap.
As I’ve said….and said and said….this is what makes Apple great. They’re not bound by the past, not the pasts of any or all industries, not their own. Refusal to be bound by limitations of the past is the foundation of innovation.
By contrast, which company is most tied to satisfying current customers, and allowing those customers to keep doing exactly what they’re doing for as long as possible? Microsoft. They just had the best quarter in the company’s entire history, driven almost entirely by sales of Windows.
Their actual innovation, though, is easily 10 years in the rear-view mirror. Are you excited to have Apple’s most creative years 10 years in the past? Oh, wait, their last innovation for editing before this one WAS 10 years in the past. (Even ProRes came 4 years AFTER Avid released DNxHD.) So maybe so.
But I don’t think so really. I think you WANT an Apple who aggressively innovates, even if you’d rather that they not innovate their foot right up your bottom. It’s just the wheel of karma. Hang around Apple long enough, and it will roll right over you, as it has since the day the Mac was introduced over 28 years ago.
C’mon, admit it. This is why you love Apple. They keep starting over.