Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
-
[Chris Jacek] “I can say that professional real-world feedback ranks very low on the priority list.”
This came up in the iPad 2 launch. A reporter asked something about feedback from iPad 1 customers, and the reply was something along the lines of, we don’t solicit feedback, we just try to make the coolest stuff. If you think about it, that really rings true.
To their credit, they mostly get this stuff right. Even when they kind of don’t, or a product goes its own way regardless of what’s expected, the rest of the world has tended to follow soon enough.
There is nothing in Apple’s experience to suggest that there’s a better way for them to handle product design and deployment.
Not so great if you’re a customer who actually needs something specific, though.
-
[Scott Shucher] “Whatever it was is gone now.”
Wow, what a sad observation, so eloquently stated. Remarkable.
Wait, what? Ah, you’re talking about the event listed at apple.com. I thought you were talking about Final Cut Pro: “Whatever it was is gone now.”
Heavy.
-
[walter biscardi] ” There was no way Avid was going to allow one of their hardware boards to work with Apple Final Cut Pro, even though Pinnacle was trying to make it sound like it would stay around.”
But that was nowhere near the case. Pinnacle hadn’t updated Cinewave since 2002. By 2005, there was talk of a class action suit by Pinnacle customers which didn’t come to pass, based on Pinnacle’s failure to keep the promises regarding Cinewave that you refer to, Walter. This was on Pinnacle’s watch.
The hardware whiz behind it, Carl Calabria (who also developed the TrueVision NuVista), became the VP of Engineering at Avid, where he had plenty of other things to worry about — but had already turned his attention to other things while still at Pinnacle, including Liquid hardware and storage. Cinewave had virtually zero sales, and no effort BY PINNACLE to update, *before* Avid acquired Pinnacle. It would have required a massive *resurrection* effort for a product that was far from the state of the art by then. Avid simply *declared* the death of a product that had died at the hands of its creators.
I’m stating this in overly broad terms, but still the gist.
In fact, though, if you look around the archives, you can find discussions as early as 2001 of people having second thoughts about their decision to buy Cinewave in the first place. My favorite quote, from August 19, 2001 by Jeffrey Fitzgerald, is “it seemed to me that Cinewave was the most versatile and forward looking piece of hardware on the market – but that does require a leap of faith in terms of trusting Pinnacle.” He was right on both counts: it was forward looking, and Pinnacle wasn’t committed to it for the long haul.
You might also ask yourself, where did all the other hardware vendors go? Pinnacle axed TrueVision, which supported FC on Windows ;-), Matrox is back in a big way with MXO but had one of the first cards to go, along with Digital Voodoo, Aurora, and a box from ProMax that died in the water before launching – ask those guys who killed them. The company whose name starts with A is NOT Avid. I don’t know if this was a factor with Cinewave or not.
(Worth noting: Avid has supported FCP in a number of ways. Unity supported FCP clients 5 or 6 years ago. Media Composer reads ProRes on both Mac AND on Windows. And Euphonix hardware obviously supports Final Cut Pro. It says right on Avid.com that they offer “unmatched control and integration with Final Cut Pro.” Some of the assumed antipathy is simply not the case.
And certainly not like Avid killed Liquid software or hardware after buying it with Pinnacle. Pinnacle’s hardware supported uncompressed before Avid’s did, which Avid showcased on stage at NAB 2005. The significant development plans underway at Pinnacle very much continued, with Avid’s full support, for years afterward. Liquid was also supported by a dealer channel that Avid grew, not contracted. They kept Liquid to fill a gap in the product line that Media Composer software eventually filled better, but like all acquisitive companies, whether Apple, Avid, or Adobe, you mostly buy things to make money off of them until you can’t anymore.)
That said, I think you were entirely right about Cinewave, Walter – just a little off about who killed it, and when. 🙂
In the case of FCP, there were a lot of people who had started looking for their next NLE after the last, very weak, update to FCS, and were holding out to see what this release offered. Now you know.
This was another case of declaring the death of something (a future with FCP along a similar development path) that Apple clearly had no intention of following through on at least two years ago. Now is the PERFECT time for many people to make their next move, even if for others, it’s a better time to wait.
Once your vendor of choice has shown that their future differs from yours, though, you need to make a call. I admire your boldness, Walter, and always have.
-
With a friendly reminder that we have an FCPX Techniques forum right next door, I agree that, once a layer of spleen is peeled back, this has been a very interesting set of conversations about a much wider set of topics than mere software.
That has always been true at Creative COW, but certainly more so than ever here.
I don’t know that we need to rename the forum. People just need to understand that the letters mean different things.
That other forum is Final Cut Pro X Techniques.
This forum is Full Contact Pugilism Xtravaganza.
Yr pal,
Timmy Wilson
Creative COW -
[Steve Connor] “This post may be more suited to the FCPX forum :)”
🙂
That said, this is still the “do” forum rather than the “talk” forum, where some folks admit haven’t actually tried to edit a project with it.
Trying and not liking is always fine, and I know that I’m interested to find any answers that people may have had for the issues, which is of course right in this forum’s wheelhouse…
thx,
tw -
[Chris Kenny] “Please name some of these “bad products” that have been highly successful because of Apple’s magical marketing.”
You mean besides Final Cut Pro?
Kidding.
Rather than spout another opinion, I’ll let Apple take the floor.
Apple TV – may not be a bad product, but maybe barely a product at all yet. It was introduced in 2006 as “a work in progress.” Its relaunch as Take Two implied something that Steve made explicit: “Apple TV was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer. It was not what people wanted.”
As late as 2009, Tim Cook said in Apple’s Q2 earnings call, “In fact unit sales were up over 3 times vs the year-ago quarter. However let me be clear, we still consider this a hobby.”
They “only” sold an estimated 6.6 million up until then, at least another 2 million since then (820,000 in Q2 11 alone! Don’t have the Q3 number yet)…but not bad for a product that people have been told repeatedly isn’t that important yet.
It doesn’t do any less than they say it does, but buying a product in this state is kinda like paying to be a beta tester. Any other companies you’ve ever paid a hundred dollars…or two…or three…to test a product that wasn’t exactly on the front burner?
I said any OTHER companies. 🙂
Fortune recently told the tale of what happened soon after the launch of MobileMe.
According to a participant in the meeting, Jobs walked in, clad in his trademark black mock turtleneck and blue jeans, clasped his hands together, and asked a simple question:
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, “So why the f^ck doesn’t it do that?”For the next half-hour Jobs berated the group. “You’ve tarnished Apple’s reputation,” he told them. “You should hate each other for having let each other down.”
(I included the link for that one, but the other quotes are easy to find if you want to look ’em up.)
I love that Steve takes failure so seriously. Even personally. I also appreciate that Apple never claimed that Apple TV was anything more than it was. But Apple continued to sell at least one product that they said was incomplete, and one that the CEO considered pathetic. If iCloud wasn’t ready yet, my guess is that they’d still be selling MobileMe.
I’m not always inclined to a let a company’s opinion of their products stand as the last word, but here, I will. I’m not saying that they’re evil or cynical. They’re not. They’re just a company. As the thread says, just another observation.
-
[Todd Terry] “He was terrible. He was short….”
Dude, calling out a guy for his height. Not cool.
-
[Bob Zelin] “Basically, your company can take FCP X and do you know what with it. “
Presumably something very similar to what many people want Apple to do with it.
-
[Sean Thomas] “BTW – Still got (2) M100 system siting in the closet!”
Sean, if you haven’t, you really owe it to yourself to check out the software-only version of Media 100. Not only will it open your old Media 100 projects (woo-hoo!), it will open your old FCP projects (WOO-HOO!!). It supports FCP and Avid media, including ProRes and DNxHD, 3rd-party hardware, and lots of other cool stuff.
If you haven’t used it for a while, you’re going to be very, very pleasantly surprised. Anybody who came to FCP from Media 100 should most definitely add this to the list of software to evaluate.
Disclosure: I spent $30,000 on the Media 100 system I built my business around, and another $15,000 for the TWENTY SEVEN GIGS of storage that went with it. Loooooved it.
-
[Mitch Ives] “It’s the iPad2 that’s driving the increase in revenues”
Apple’s last earnings call was in April, and iPad 2 numbers were well under the prediction. Four million something on predictions of six million. I think that the street keeping the stock more or less flat was an understanding that this was an issue of capacity not keeping up with demand.
At the time, it was all about iPhone 4, which was had more than doubled YoY. From here, I think it’s about Lion. Apple’s OS sales are a much overlooked source of money joy. Even when price is incremental, or zero, the attention drives hardware sales. And that quarter ending in March (Apple’s Q2) had the best Q2 Mac sales in history, driven largely by iMac.
Here’s the irony – Apple said that iMac sales were largely driven by the halo effect from iPad 2! So rather than cannibalizing iMac sales, iPad is driving them. Not sure about laptops, though, but in the meantime, even missing iPad 2 expectations by a couple of million units is turning into gold for Apple.
Anyway, doubling iPhone 4 sales comes despite the most widely-reported misstep in Apple product history, and affected far more people than anything in pro software possibly could. It’s unlikely that even FCP sales dropping to zero would have a major effect on the stock.
For now though, you should consider the many people (millions?) who were using FCP for free. It can’t really happen with an app, so $299 represents a step UP in price for many people (the majority?) from free. Even at $299, this price could very well help cull the herd of scads of skater boiz, more than invite them in.