Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Charlie Austin] “What potential features of these 3 things would have won you over? Something like this?”
You know I love you Charlie, but that’s always been a straw man that Apple hides behind. Keeping the headphone jack ain’t a punchcard reader…although as I noted, I don’t think losing the headphone jack is all that big a deal, even though I use it constantly for both listening and phoning.
I’m a fan of going all-in on disruption, though (see also: FCPX launch and Creative Cloud), so if they think digital is the future, I’m GLAD they’re not trying to hold on to the jack that’s currently my primary interface with my phone. GO FOR IT, fellas. That’s what Apple is SUPPOSED to do.
Even though Apple’s events are now device centered, I still remember the days not that long ago when the devices weren’t years behind the curve. Water resistance? Well, two years late is better than never. I’m just happier when they’re swinging for the fences. They’re barely even squaring up to bunt anymore.
I’ve written here many times about how I think that cars are Apple’s destiny, with the potential to change the world more, and for more better, than all of their previous devices combined, but now I think, wow, do they even care about changing the world any more?
To answer your rhetorical question with another one, what it would it even look like for Apple to Think Different anymore? What would it look like for Apple to surprise us again?
There’s not a single category where they weren’t MANY years late. Spotify since 2006, watches widespread worldwide four years before Apple came in, etc. Unlike iPod and iPad, it’s also been a while since they came in late but still managed to immediately reset industry agendas and customer expectations.
I do wonder why people keep expecting major “old school” computer announcements or general pro focus. Those days are long gone. I’m okay with that. Disrupt away, Timmy! I’m just having a hard time imagining them catching all the way up anymore, much less leading the way.
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[Shane Ross] “Microsoft announced that Windows 10 will be the last version of that OS they release, and all updates to that will only be bug fixes….and that moving forward Windows will be “a service.” So really, not sure what to think…”
The thing that The Verge missed (unusual for them — they’re frequently the ONLY ones who understand what’s what) is that Apple did this a loooong time ago, and they too did it with number 10.
Quick! How many years for OS X?
Answer: Fif. Teen. Years. Fifteen! It was introduced in 2001. In fact, I had actually started on an article for the COW in 2011, called “X Years of OS X”, but you know what? I couldn’t care enough to finish it. LOL Not because I didn’t care about Apple (I was still a customer then), but because really, truly, NOBODY cared. Look around the web. I defy you to find that ANYBODY wrote about this at the time.
And 2011 feels like a lot longer than five years ago. Hell, this time in 2011, we were only a couple of months into FCPX. LOL Seems like muuuuuuch longer than five years ago.
My point being that you can’t buy the Mac OS anymore. It’s just there. When there’s a new version to download, you download it. The only reason there’s a name for it (Sierra is a good name for once) is because some hardware won’t run it and such, there are some outlying compatibility issues, but really, you don’t NEED to know the name of your computer OS any more than you need to know the name of the OS of your smart TV, your Kindle, or your car. What’s that you say, there’s a software or firmware update? Sure, why not.
Microsoft is just in the uncomfortable position of having hundreds of millions of customers who demand accountability, transparency, and long-term road maps. LOL Apple doesn’t know anything about that. Apple customers don’t care enough to have made it a priority either, so this conversation LOOKS alien, when really, it’s not at all. Apple just never bothered to HAVE that conversation, because really, talking to customers about plans is just so…so…..Microsoft. Gross.
Don’t forget: Steve Jobs explicitly, publicly, and repeatedly blamed the stupidity of everybody else’s products on the fact that those other companies care what customers think. Always a mistake, he said. Always. And he wasn’t being facetious. Try to argue against that with actual business case studies. You can’t.
Conversely, the most communicative, accountable, transparent company? Find me somebody who does better than Microsoft. You can’t. And how much does it make you love them? More than zero?
btw, Windows 10 as a thing: support goes through 2025. SEE? HOW HARD IS THAT? IT’S NOT HARD. lol
But caring what customers think is always a mistake, so Apple’s never going to make the mistake of speaking this sort of thing aloud.
Anyway, I’m with you 100%. Whatever else Apple has been trying to teach its customers, its that Apple can only be trusted to look after its own interests. It’s been working for Apple, it’s been working for most of its customers most of the time, but anybody who needs to COUNT on Apple should do what you’re doing, and simply make plans without them.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “I think a number of us are probably hoping that at least the FCP X/Motion update isn’t quite such a damp squib …”
Damp squib? You make it sound like that’s a bad thing. I thought that “damp squib” was a festive traditional holiday treat in the UK. You know, like….
And actually, now I think about it, I’m sure that some of you are hoping that the next FCPX/Motion update isn’t microwaveable spotted dick, either.
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[Kalleheikki Kannisto] “I should probably just stop fiddling with those settings.”
No, you should be able to fiddle with them to your heart’s content, and the fiddling should work. 🙂
Bizarrely enough, when you changed your name, your account flipped back into moderated mode. I immediately reset it to be unmoderated of course, but there is clearly something afoot.
Thanks for your patience while we work this out!
More soon,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
[Andrew Kimery] “I think the third NLE is almost as easy as the first”
I’m one’a them thar pointy-headed liberal arts nerds that’s been destroying America, and I can tell you that this is true for languages too. Learning the second one is tough, but the third one comes surprisingly easily. After that, you can learn pretty much as many as you want. Learning languages is a skillset that supersedes the TASK of learning any PARTICULAR language.
The hard part is letting go of the bad habits you picked up while learning the second one in the first place. LOL
And yes, that absolutely applies to remapping keyboard shortcuts from one application to another. If all you need to do is a task or two at hand, fine, remap shortcuts to the ones you already know. If you want to actually learn the new NLE, don’t. It’s a trap.
To me, though, the real ninja power is mapping each NLE to a UNIQUE set of custom keyboard shortcuts. For example, my rule is if it takes three fingers, it probably ain’t short enough, so if I use the not-short-enough-cut a lot, I remap it. But I use different shortcuts in different applications, so my customized shortcuts in one NLE have nothing whatsoever to do with my customized shortcuts in another — but I’m always looking out for efficiencies to be gained from unique remappings.
That is, there’s nothing sacred about the stock shortcuts, per se. They’re not incantations. They do reflect sets of priorities, though. Top level commands are top-level for a reason, but the specific assignments of keys to those top-level functions can always always always be improved upon, imo.
But that’s different than deciding not to explore efficiencies already built-in…which is also different than deciding not to maximize those efficiencies even further. 🙂
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[Todd Terry] “And… still thinking the OP is likely spam.”
Not spam. 🙂
Guys, there’s literally not a single more proven method in advertising than celebrity endorsement. It’s been going on from the very, very beginning of advertising, and sponsors keep doing it because it works.
The first use of it that I can remember is from the 1760s, when Wedgewood got the royals to endorse their China. I remember it like it was yesterday. LOL
I was wearing my Michael Jordans at the time. LOL Srsly, the fact that I don’t need to tell you what that means is all you need to know about celebrity endorsements. They’re the ugliest, least comfortable shoes of all time imo, but put that fella’s name on it, and they turn into gold.
An early case of a celebrity actually being aware of endorsements as an actual thing was the esteemed minister Rev. Henry Ward Beecher.
Suffering from a case of hay fever, Rev. Beecher found a good cure in Dr. M M Townsend’s Remedy for Hay Fever, Asthma and Catarrh. He sent Dr. Townsend two separate letters praising the medicine and also telling him that he was ‘at liberty to make such use of this letter as may secure the relief of all hay fever patients. Dr. Townsend used the full text of both the letters in a package insert of the product box.
I know that most of you are way too cool to be persuaded by anything, and much MUCH too cool to be actual fans of anyone, but there are reasons why some of the classic celebrity endorsements are classics. These include embedded from the earliest days of print, the earliest days of radio, to say nothing of the implied endorsement of sponsored programming.
Trading cards? Celebrity endorsement. That one’s an interesting field, where Topps stopped making the gum they were trying to sell, because it was getting the endorsements greasy!
WHEATIES? HEARD OF IT?
I bet you could come up with a million of these if you just thought about it — Ronald Reagan for Chesterfield, Arthur Godfrey for Colgate, Dinah Shore for Chevrolet, Wilt Chamberlain for Volkswagen (I’ll never forget him unfolding himself from a Beetle), Mean Joe Green for Coke (remember the kid in the tunnel? If you’re my age and say you don’t, I don’t believe you), John Cameron Swayze for Timex (“Takes a licking and keeps on ticking!), Dolly Parton for Breeze, Loretta Lynn for Crisco, Brooke Shields and Mark Wahlberg for Calvin Klein (jeans and undies), Bob Uecker and a bevy of others for Miller Lite (a product that wouldn’t exist without those early “Tastes great! Less filling!” spots), Bill Cosby for pudding (oops — BUT YOU REMEMBER IT), Sting and a bevy of others for MTV (these “I want my MTV” spots weren’t just promos — MTV ran the ads on other stations to encourage people to get their cable systems to carry MTV at all)….
If one of you can’t name a dozen of these off the top of your head, well, I won’t call you a liar, but I’ll think it in my head. LOL
The power of endorsement is ESPECIALLY true of social media, where platforms like Instagram are massively driven by celebrities endorsing their own power drinks or jewelry lines or whatever. There are celebrities whose social media is pretty much all endorsement all the time.
So John, I agree with you. A picture of a celebrity with your product on social media is a FANTASTIC idea. Go for it! I think it may be harder than you think, for this exact reason: celebrities are very aware of how much money there is in endorsements.
Hey, it’s a living, right? Who are we at the COW to look down on anyone else’s advertising strategy, right?
Have some fun with this tag at AdWeek: https://www.adweek.com/topic/celebrity-endorsements
And just Google a couple of articles on the subject. I promise you’ll be beaming ear to ear as you read some of these and relive some of your happiest childhood memories.
As for as tenuous connections go, I think the more random the better. John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten of The Sex Pistols) for Country Life Butter was a gas. He insisted they let him mostly write the spots, and he used the money to fund an album and tour when he was between labels. And as he said, “You can tell by looking at me that I eat a lot of butter.”
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I’m going to skip Bob Dylan’s short for Victoria’s Secret, even though it was awesome, because I think his conversation with Watson is even more random. As random as Bob himself.
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Okay, the butter one is better. Thanks, Farmer’s Wife!
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[Stephen Schuknecht] “I wish I knew After Effects! I’ve seen people take a screen recording of the app and replace it via green screen over the iphone…. definitely out of my skill level! “
Don’t rule that out too quickly, Stephen! Especially with mochaAE bundled with After Effects (“mocha” being the flagship product from Academy Sci Tech award winning Imagineer), it’s drop-dead easy. Tutorials abound, as well as a VERY helpful AE community here in the COW.
There’s a reason why people so often use this technique to address this challenge, and mochaAE really does make it easy!
I agree that you’re otherwise VERY much on the right track. I’m also pleased that you’re enjoying the work so far! It’s a very rewarding skillset to add to what you’ve clearly already got going on. Using bundled effects to do the heavy lifting is definitely a pro trick that’s worth learning. 🙂
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Lisa, please accept my official apology. You’re quite right, this thread spun out of control, completely in violation of our terms of service, which explicitly forbid the kind of exchanges here. It’s been years since I’ve turned off even a single post for breaking the rules, but here were eight that fell outside the lines.
Two quick reminders:
1) There are no circumstances when it’s ever appropriate to post about other posters, their motives, or their intelligence. Please feel to report such posts to us, and we’ll respond swiftly and appropriately. Even in our full-contact debate forums, where we’re a bit more lax about such things, there are limits.
2) There is in fact an Ignore button! Click on a member’s name, which will take you to their profile. (You’ll see an ignore button in the upper left, just under their picture. From then on, you won’t see their posts at all.
Actually, just above the ignore button, directly under the picture in the upper left of someone’s profile page, you’ll find a “Subscribe” button. A much happier option. Please use that one for all the people whose posts tend to make you happy. You’ll get an alert every time they post, anywhere in the COW. This is one of my favorite features in the COW.
Although, as a confession, I did in fact also invent the Ignore button. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Lisa, thanks again.
Apologies to you and everyone else for intervening in a fashion that I do everything I can to avoid. In the meantime, I’ve closed the thread for further replies. If anyone has any problems with any of this, please feel to write me directly (tim at etc etc), and I’ll happily discuss it.
Regards,
Tim Wilson
Editor-in-Chief
Creative COW -
Ha! I meant to write you and ask where the heck your reply is. LOL
I think you may have been regularly shooting film longer than just about anyone here. Do you remember when your last film project was?
And out of curiosity, which film camera(s) were you using?
The Leitz/Panavision primes, iirc yes?
And something like 8 or 9 years ago, you wrote an article for us on Depth of Field converters. Any use for them anymore?
Thanks!
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[Andrew Kimery] “The old way of just selling a perpetual license for a piece of software is dying. “
Perpetual phone licenses are dying too. We haven’t really talked about that here, but it’s a compelling play: keep paying monthly, and we’ll make sure you have the new thing. The plan being pushed on me will allow me to reduce my payments by half, and get a new phone up to twice a year.
The fact is that most people don’t take them up on the offer to change phones twice a year. Me, it takes me 6 months to finish customizing a new phone. LOL Even once a year is almost too much. But for somebody who largely sticks with the stock OS and isn’t a crypto-anarchist about being tied to a carrier, it’s a great deal.
More for iOS since it’s all-but-uncustomizable in any meaningful way, but just as Apple was the first to introduce the end of OS sales and upgrades, I think that subscription-only iPhones will be the norm sooner rather than later.
oooooooooo, says the boomer — you’ll get the crap beaten out of you if you try to change carriers or switch from an iPhone to Android or vice versa! Uhm, why would I do that? I like my phone. All carriers suck but mine is the best in my area or I wouldn’t be using them. What’s YOUR excuse?
Look, we can go down the line. Apple’s music sales business was decimated by monthly subscriptions (notably Spotify) in far swifter fashion than digital sales decimated physical sales. They spent $3 billion for Beats just to stay in the music game at all. Why? Paying monthly for new music is too compelling.
Netflix, anyone? Paying monthly for new movies and access to TV libraries is too compelling.
The perpetual license for cars is dying, too. Leasing now represents over 30% of new car acquisitions. Among millenials, it’s even higher, and rose over 40% last year.
Why? Because paying monthly for the new thing is too compelling.
You folks insisting on permanent licenses for cars, so to speak, are missing the fact that it’s now more often true than not that LEASING IS CHEAPER THAN MONTHLY PAYMENTS.
Why? Because they CAN be. A car manufacturer knows that this year’s lease will very likely convert to another lease in 2018 or 2019, likely for a more expensive monthly payment because it’s only a hundred or two bucks a month to SERIOUSLY upgrade….versus a new sale…when? Five years? Eight? Ten? When you have to compete from scratch against every car in the universe? When the customer may not have the $10-20,000 to go up a level or two?
Fooey. Let’s sell the car to ourselves at a lower price, market new leases directly to the people who are already paying us to KEEP paying us. Eeeeeasy.
Srsly. Buying for $0 down 0% monthly interest is a sucker’s deal for people who are committed to a lifestyle of depreciation and old stuff.
That’s one reason why millennials are leading the way. The lie of longterm ownership being the highest economic good is being exposed as just that. A lie.
Another reason why millennials are leasing in large numbers is because they can. More than just being accessible (the average new car price is $33,000!!!), it offers real benefits. They’ve had enough of driving beaters that break down more often than they can afford to repair, with insurance they can’t afford to keep up, stuck with a trade-in value of next to nothing because the car is next to worthless.
Exchanging that nonsense for one monthly payment + gas. The end.
Here’s what many ppl have missed in your ranting about Adobe and The AWFUL TERRIBLE NO GOOD VERY BAD SUBSCRIPTION-ONLY MODEL. Adobe has more customers than ever.
Keep telling me how bad this is for you, how untenable it is for you. I believe you.
Doesn’t matter. Adobe has more customers than ever. An entire class of customers has access to ALL of Adobe’s stuff that was never going to have access to it before. I think it’s one reason why so many of you have reported the proliferation of jobs requesting Adobe expertise. Because they can. Because there’s a wave of Adobe artists both larger and more proficient than anyone could have predicted even just a few years ago.
Frankly, I’m not convinced that Adobe predicted numbers this high. Certainly exceeding any publicly announced projections.
Anybody who wants FCPX has it. Had it years ago. But there are millions of people who had no meaningful access to After Effects…oh yeah, AND ALL THIS OTHER STUFF…but can now get it for $49/month. Being “locked into Adobe” is as useless an argument as telling them that they’re locking themselves into Netflix or iPhone or Spotify.
“Uhm, why would I stop paying, you bloviating boomer? Can’t you see? I’m getting an insane amount of stuff for very little money, and instead of wasting my time depreciating out of date crap, I don’t have out of date crap. ”
I’m obviously a fan of yapping about philosophy all day long. But note that I’ve barely touched on philosophy here. Just boring old facts. When customers are given a choice, they are stampeding toward monthly payments.
And manufacturers in every field are increasingly less interested in handholding boomers who need the psychological comfort of depreciation as they’re being lowered into their graves. LOL Monthly payments are better business, and leading to higher customer satisfaction across the board.
And hey, paying a trivial amount for FCPX and never paying again is fun too. But Apple’s pretty much the only one who can sustain that model for software, and they’re increasingly encouraging monthly subscriptions for the freshest phones, and are rapidly transitioning to going all-in on music and (I betcha) movies and TV too. They’re done competing with Blockbuster. Time to saddle up on Netflix or say goodbye to that market forever too.
This isn’t just a thing. It’s THE thing. Other than mayyyyyybe the near-universality of credit cards, there has been no economic trend in our lifetimes that has moved nearly this quickly or nearly this broadly. And while this shift is obviously dependent on credit cards, the transition to subscriptions and similar non-purchase installments is also driving the economy faster and further than anything we’ve ever seen before from purchase-only business models.
