[Tim Wilson]

The guys in this video are all part of Creative COW. Both Rob Ashe and Dan Dome wrote articles for Creative COW Magazine, and Rob’s article included a picture of Dave. (Way to go, Dave!)

They’re really wonderful articles. You should definitely take a look. Oh, and in Dan’s article, he talks about leading the transition to FCP at Conan’s previous show, as well as at Saturday Night Live.

You’ll really enjoy both of them.

Rob Ashe, Designing Conan

Dan Dome, Wiring Conan

Just 2 more reasons you should be subscribing to Creative COW Magazine!

Tim Wilson
Creative COW Magazine

[Tim Wilson]

We loved the FCPX forum idea, because we could see that, once that download landed, conversation was going to swamp anyone in the FCP forum trying to get help with their current work. And indeed, FCPX was our top forum on its very first day, very nearly doubling our original FCP forum, which itself has been the busiest FCP community anywhere on line.

Good for anyone wanting to talk about what this means for business, the future, etc. Not so good for anyone wanting to talk about using FCPX today.

So welcome here. Tell your friends. 🙂 It will probably take another day or so to build up the kind of momentum we need so that folks will get the kind of help they’ve come to expect from the COW, in the timeframe they need.

Thanks,
Tim

[Tim Wilson]

[Brad Jordan] “I understand you’re pissed. Just stop rubbing it in people’s faces…who would like to start moving on to learn this software to decide if I need to stick with it or jump ship. Peace”

I noted this below, but I want to reiterate that we hear you Brad, and we agree. This particular forum serves as an important place to let off steam, but we’ve also seen that many of you — approaching most of you already, by the end of the second day — are ready to get to work, or at least try to.

So please do pay a visit to the FCP X Techniques forum that you’ll also find linked in the orange nav bar above.

And for the record, Creative COW Magazine has featured wedding videography, the founder’s son was a sponsored skateboarder on the pro circuit, and I can’t WAIT for the summer X Games to roll back around. Skateboarding is one of the coolest things I watch on my 3DTV. 🙂

In any case, swing by the FCP X Techniques forum for some cooler-headed conversation about this.

Also for the record, we’ve seen the growing incivility you’re talking about Brad, especially in the Final Cut forums, which is sadly, sadly ironic given the grief that EVERY FCP user got in the beginning. We’ve tried to figure out a way to address this. If anyone has any ideas, please start a thread in the Letters To The COW Team forum.

Best,

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

For the record, yours really WAS the first post here! The others that look earlier were ones that I transferred over from the FCPX forum, and I was afraid had got lost in the stampede there.

Thanks for being the first at the party, always a lonely prospect until the band comes on and people start dancing. 🙂

We admins now return you to conversation with people who know what they’re talking about. 🙂

Tim Wilson
Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

We know that there are thousands of folks who are ready to get to work with FCP X, so I wanted you to know that we’ve just opened a new forum, FCPX Techniques.

We’re migrating appropriate threads there from here, where they may have gotten lost in the stampede, but we’re also looking forward to lots of new conversations about how to actually USE this thing.

See you next door!

Tim Wilson and the team at Creative COW

[Tim Wilson]

Hey guys,

We hear you loud and clear, so we’ve just created a new forum called FCP Techniques.

I’m moving some appropriate threads over that may have gotten lost in the noise, but by all means, feel free to repost your questions. It will take a few hours to draw a crowd….but I doubt much more than that. People are clearly ready to get back to work, and supporting that has always been our first priority here at Creative COW.

See you next door! 🙂

Best,
Tim Wilson and the rest of the COW Team

[Tim Wilson]

Another way of saying “We’re just trying to make great products” is “we don’t trust anyone else to know a great product if it bit them in the butt. At least not until we give we them what WE think is great, and then they agree.”

There are a bunch of measures of success, and to me, they largely fall into two buckets. One is the hardcore business side: profit/loss, market disruption, stockholder perception, etc.

On that level, everything that Apple has done is perfect. Even the antenna issues with iPhone 4 – irrelevant for more than a couple of weeks, and only among people who talk about such things, and most of that talk is to each other. Apple has made zero mistakes worth talking about for any length of time, and that deserves study on its own.

The part of the “market” that we’re talking about here is the customer side. The first issue there is, who’s the customer? The people using FCP now, or the customers Apple wants? What’s the horizon for their own measure of success?

Apple consistently releases products late, overpriced and underfeatured. It has happened from the beginning, when the Mac was the last computer on the planet still working in black and white. iPod was very nearly the last PMP to market, and to get there, Apple took features out of the software they bought from Casaday&Green (SoundJam) to turn into iTunes, and they’re still not back. We all remember how pathetic FCP was back in the day. Apple TV – still “a hobby,” but not going to be forever.

So at every step, they came in below customer expectations. Every one of those was an area of disappointment…ah, but…to use the iPod as an example. Sure, it sucked compared to almost the entire market when it came out, but it EXPLODED the market, so not even a single percentage point of the then-existing market gave a poo about its deficiencies. Didn’t even come up. iPod came to define the market.

(The one exception to this pattern: iPad. Cornering the market on components helped, but Apple is consistently underpricing itself relative to the competitive feature set. iPhone is already being outsold, and it will fall further behind to a Windows-style ecosystem from Google. Already well underway.

iPad? I don’t see that going anywhere. I have my wishlist for iPad 3, but looking at the leap from 1 to 2, I’m not looking at other pads as hard as I am other phones. I’m on my fourth iPhone in less than a year not because I love them so much, but because it keeps crapping out. Thank goodness for Apple Care. Don’t leave the Apple store without it.)

I’m going to skip the thing that everybody skips: Apple II was very nearly the best-selling computer on the market, and Apple dropped an atomic bomb on its customers. No hardware compatibility when they introduced Mac, ZERO software compatibility, and where Apple II was famous for openness, Apple welded the case shut.

System 6 to 7 – blew up the entire world again. Forced new hardware, new software, was the least stable OS EVER (if you weren’t there, you have no idea – a gazillion times worse than Vista), and a year later, nobody cared.

OS 9 to X – same story. OS 10.2, same story. A year later from each, nobody cared. In both cases, because the market grew so much faster afterward, and none of the new customers cared, and because by the time the of next release cycle, everything was fine.

Apple has always been willing to blow up its customer base in the service of creating a better customer experience.

The thing is, if Microsoft tried ANY of this, there’d be blood in the street to the horse’s bridle. There’s no company on earth who could have gotten away with this once — selling a product that the CEO stands on stage and TELLS you it’s not a real product? Well, it’s working for Apple TV, whose sales are still going up even though nobody can say exactly what it does.

We’ll know after the release of Lion (looking like September from here), but I think that FCPX will be another example of Apple being delighted to infuriate its customer base, and willing to lose a large number of them…whoops, it won’t lose a single one, not really, and they’ll gain a bazillion of them. It’s the price we pay for being current Apple customers, rather than future ones…because hey, we’ll be future customers soon enough.

I can’t say I’m happy about any of this, but I also can’t say that my wallet won’t be out for Lion, and who knows what else by the end of the year.

I spend as much time hating them as loving them, and the end result is that I keep buying their stuff.

Success.

[Tim Wilson]

I think Benjamin is right on track: Vista was a strong foundation with garbage on top, which Windows 7 cleaned up. For all that I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro, and a hardcore Apple user since 1979 (yes), W7 is my favorite OS to date…although Lion is looking mighty fine, so we’ll see. As much as I think it would have done Apple some good to wait until the fall to roll this out, as Signore Springsteen wrote, Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny.

As for Avid guys piling on being obnoxious, they are a teeny tiny part of this. There aren’t Avid trolls running around this forum – it’s primarily people who have established themselves as FCP mainstays over a period of years. The fact is that Avid, Adobe, Microsoft, Sony, the commies, the aliens, and Elvis himself COMBINED could not possibly stir up the rage, resentment and Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that Apple themselves have.

Apple has succeeded to the extent that right now, they are their only enemy. They are the only ones who can stop their own progress. Betting against any business that Apple is in for the long haul is for suckers….

…which isn’t to say that this release isn’t a disaster for you. Maybe it is. Apple has weathered more disasters than I can think of, but right now, System 7, OS X, 10.2, anything related to a processor change come to mind – disasters, every one of them. It all turned out fine. Vista really is the perfect example.

PS. A big, big reason why Vista was a disaster was because people tried to run (whether you like it or not) a modern OS on old machines. It hasn’t happened as much for Apple because so many of its problems were caused by their own new machines, but whatever else you have planned for the future of FCPX or Lion, you better be saving your pennies now.

[Tim Wilson]

For the record:

[Tim Wilson]

We’ll discuss later the meaning of the word “guru.” For now, enjoy Gary’s article. 🙂