[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “I think Oliver’s POV is based in what Tim talked about in his first post about publicly traded companies having to release w/in the quarter if they talk about an upgrade to an existing product or they could run afoul of SOX.

This.

And it’s not that publicly traded companies CAN’T take longer than 90 days. If they slip, they just have to withhold that dollar amount equivalent to the value of that feature set until they DO ship. People do it all the time, but this the very, very specific reason why “shipping in June” has been a mantra at NAB for decades, going back long before SOX. It was sound accounting practice, even before SOX gave it teeth.

[Andrew Kimery] “This probably doesn’t apply to Apple in this case since I doubt they have to worry much about when they ‘recognize’ the revenue from FCP X given the boatloads of cash they make from other parts of the company.”

For current customers, there’s NO revenue to recognize from future-facing announcements, because there’s no revenue coming. Hence my prediction from the beginning that there will never be an upgrade charge for FCPX. Bookkeeping stays nice and simple, and development schedules aren’t disrupted by arbitrary business cycles.

And yeah, even if Apple were to embark on a plan that required unrecognized revenue: for the amount to be withheld from sales based on promised features, the amount is trivial. That is, say the promised feature is for support for the Kellog’s Frosted Codec Camera — Apple would only have to withhold the value of that single codec, from within an already trivial fee.

But why put yourself through that kind of agony? Compliance costs generally the same for a trivial amount of money as it does for a massive amount of money, because the compliance process is irrespective of the dollar amount. Easy enough to just avoid it by having NDA briefings.

[Noah Kadner] “We can only offer coffee and water. “

That’s plenty. Hydration is important. 🙂

[Tim Wilson]

[Craig Seeman] “But do they have any “special” friends anymore? Seems they don’t have “favored” journalists anymore. Anyone who happened to be at NAB got into the meeting without needing a secret password or byline.”

I think that’s the definition of friend, though: that you want to hear what they have to say, face to face.

The thing about journalists is that they tend to be jaded. They’re the guys in the back of the room with their arms crossed. They’ve heard it all before. They’re too cool to clap.

Apple doesn’t need those guys.

Those guys used to the mediators, the gatekeepers who explained stuff to “us” because only they had access to the news, and only they understood it. But in this context, they’re old and slow and paying attention to the wrong things.

So rather than speak to the mediators, trying to break through the ice surrounding their cold, cold hearts LOL Apple is speaking IM-mediated-LY, to the hot-blooded who want to hear it.

The barrier is low enough, right? Cross the driveway, ride up the elevator, grab a cookie and sit down. Hey look! It’s Noah Kadner! LOL

Okay, not a barrier so low that you don’t still have to get to NAB, but that’s still a low-ish barrier as far as such things go. Easier than getting into Comic-Con, that’s for sure.

I like this plan a lot. It’s not secrecy for its own sake. It’s Apple saying, “Look, what we were doing before wasn’t doing anybody any good. We were putting our message in the hands of people who didn’t care all that much, who weren’t helping us ANY, and god bless user groups, but that’s a circus that takes more effort than we have the mental and spiritual bandwidth to manage.”

It might be different if Apple had a culture of outreach. They don’t. It’s like, there was only ever a couple of people in the whole history of the company who were any good at stage presentations. LOL The guy who was best at it resented his audiences. LOL Didn’t like customers even a little. And while there are clearly and demonstrably people within Apple who DO care about customers, there’s simply not a culture there of public presentations as a core value. Certainly no history of it.

So let’s get all that folderol out of the way, says Apple. “We’re not presenters. We’re not good with crowds and we know it. Sit down. Let’s talk.”

Right there, by lowering the barrier for almost everyone else, they’ve created enough of a barrier to keep out almost all of the “too cool to clap” crowd. “Harumph, if I can’t write about it, why bother going? ANYBODY can go now.”

More than anything else, I think Apple’s worst impulses are rooted in arrogance, and what they’re doing with the FCPWORKS meetings is the opposite of arrogance. These are advertised, they’re free, they’re intimate, they’re personal.

I’m still a fan of spectacle, mind you, and some of you geezers who were around to see me on stage back in the day know that I was as committed to putting on a good show as anyone in the game, EVER.

And I believe VERY strongly that a commitment to powerful, effective public presentations IS a commitment to customers. It reflects critical core values. A company that doesn’t care about giving good demo doesn’t care enough about its customers, not for my taste, and I don’t think they’re entirely trustworthy — but if that’s not who you are as a company, it’s not who you are.

It’d be great if Apple could manage both, but hey, there’s something to be said for self-knowledge and playing to what you WANT to be your strengths, which is a quiet pitch away from the hubbub.

So on that count, I think it’s fair to remove “secrecy” from the list of pathologies ascribed to Apple. And make no mistake. I think they’ve been pathological. I think they reflected the explicit, literal, clinical, criminal psychosis of their former leader, and am pleased by the process and progress of their detoxification.

Rather than secrecy, then, I think NDA presos via FCPWORKS as more of an offer of mutual respect. “We’ll tell you some cool stuff, but please don’t drag us into the circus. We’re here talking to you because we’ve had enough of that, and we bet you’ve had enough of companies who won’t tell you anything substantial.

Deal?”

Again noting that I don’t altogether approve of this being the entirety of the outreach plan, and I think Apple has a long, long list of problems that I personally find insurmountable….but in the scheme of things, I don’t see how this makes the list. Walk across the driveway from the LVCC, have a cookie, say hi to Noah, meet some folks from Apple, maybe even meet Bill Davis. That’s a pretty good morning, right?

[Tim Wilson]

[Craig Seeman] “Apple has no real financial interest in keeping upcoming features secret.”

On one hand, does anyone anymore?

As Scott observes above, most folks have more than one vendor’s stuff, and the having-it-ness or not-having-it-ness has nothing whatsoever to do with something that was ever kept back as a secret competitive advantage. Competitive advantages are now at a very high level, abstractions really. Conceptual. This APPROACH works for this CONTEXT.

So really, at least since the introduction of the CONCEPT of FCPX, of the CONCEPT of a subscription-only business model, there hasn’t been a FEATURE or feature set that has mattered in (software) generations.

And ironically, the only thing that has mattered has been the ABSENCE of the feature! Do you have HD? No? Then no sale.

Now back in THOSE days, our frenemies Senator Sarbanes and Representative Oxley first strode across the land like giants, and here’s why. You can’t sell people a product that doesn’t exist. You couldn’t say “HD is coming” unless it was coming THAT QUARTER without having to set aside the FINANCIAL VALUE of HD in escrow, not to be redeemed until you actually delivered HD.

That is, you can’t “recognize the revenue” of a sale until the transaction is completed: the point at which customers HAVE this product or feature you “sold” them.

You do get a grace period of a financial quarter, so if you announce in April and ship in June, you’re golden.

And what’s the announced ship date for almost every new product announced at NAB? June.

But I can give you a specific historical example of how this worked out. Avid was at one time late with HDV support, and not being able to answer the question of WHEN it was coming was hurting sales at the lowest end of the product line. Customers were telling us they were waiting for it before they’d spend, or were choosing other products that met that need for them today.

This sparked two different avenues of research. One was, okay, are they telling the truth. LOL Are they REALLY holding out on upgrades or buying other products because of HDV? What are the other factors that are REALLY driving their decisions? And when a customer does upgrade or buy a new seat, how much are the non-HDV features worth to them?

The answer is of course that, in practice, almost every other feature in the world was worth more. Copy and paste were worth more. LOL But in fact, if you have an HDV camera today and can’t edit that footage today, no sale. (This was before there was a practical software-only transcode to DNxHD option. ProRes was still four years away.)

This research mattered because the answer had to pass muster with customer-facing product managers, sales people (who were the ones hearing that pressure directly and, via the channel, indirectly), C-level execs, lawyers, and yes, the US Department of Justice.

The figure arrived at was $49. Everyone agreed, okay, in the scheme of things, that sounds about right — having or not having HDV right this second is costing us plus or minus $49.

Which leads to ANOTHER set of research. How fast can we have it, for reals? No guessing. Because however long it takes, we’re going to have to keep a pile of $49 transactions on the sidelines, which we’d really rather not do.

(Here’s how long ago this was, btw. Avid’s stock and revenue was flying high, quadrupling in the next few years, while Apple’s stock had just broken out of the single digits because of the iPod as the company was becoming derided as more focused on devices than on professionals. LOL)

The answer was, we can have it by the end of Q3.

Which led to another set of discussions. Okay, since most people don’t care at ALL about HDV, we don’t have to hold back ANY portion of those sales. We can “recognize the revenue” for 100% of THOSE sales.

Yeah, but how do we get those people to identify themselves? Here’s how. We don’t sell HDV to EVERYONE. We don’t even mention it, except to say, “If you want HDV, don’t worry! It’s coming in September! And you can reserve it now for only $49!”

Ahhhh, so you break that out as a discrete transaction! The hounds of Sarbane and Oxley are satisfied that customers are getting what they’ve paid for in an appropriate time frame, no promises are being made that aren’t being kept. Everyone is happy.

Think about it from the flip side though, and you can probably guess how fgjking LONG IT TOOK to come up with $49 and the strategy around it — except that you can’t. It took much, much longer. Much of that work was being done by product people, who combined domain expertise with customer contact in ways that nobody else in the company did. They could have been doing so much more with their time, like guiding development of new stuff, meeting with customers about much higher-priority features, etc etc etc.

THAT’s why PRODUCT people got so excited about things like subscriptions, because now they’re liberated from having to assign dollar values to features and assigning them slots in the calendar. You still need to do that at a high level to try to balance development cost and opportunity cost, resources are limited, and falling behind is too risky to sustain — but so is wobbly stuff. People will in fact stick around if your stuff is solid, and they’ll bolt if it’s not, regardless of the features.

So Adobe’s approach is, let’s keep payment moving forward, Apple’s is let’s stop charging for upgrades, Avid’s is let’s get ’em paying annually in advance via subscription OR service contract, but paying annually nonetheless.

SO WHY THE SECRETS?

Here’s why. Because in Apple’s case, that’s the only way they have left to show love to their dearest friends. Back in the old days, they might give you some product, but really, what can they give you? A phone? Some Beats headphones? If you cared about that stuff, you’d have bought it already, and you getting one more for free won’t change how you feel about Apple — so in fact, by definition, that marketing initiative will fail, every single time, because it won’t actually yield any measurable result.

That’s also why Apple doesn’t advertise FCPX or have a large public booth at NAB — those things cannot possibly make Apple any NEW money that they couldn’t have gotten any other way, so everything that they spend on that kind of marketing is by definition a failure.

So how do you get your most excitable folks excited? You tell ’em stuff.

This isn’t cynical. It’s smart. It’s also kind, generous, and humane. These people ARE special to you, so you do the one thing that will make them FEEL special, which is to treat them as if they ARE special. Tell ’em stuff.

Of course, this is all theoretical on my part. I’m just guessing, because in fact, nobody tells me stuff. LOL Ever.

But I’m surely not THAT far off, am I? Agreeing that Apple has no FINANCIAL incentive to be secretive, but some STRATEGIC ones that aren’t related to markets, but to friends. And you take care of friends using the means you have at your disposal, which in this case is very simply staying in touch.

Here, friend. Pull up a chair. Let’s talk about some things that are important to each other.

[Tim Wilson]

I just voted! What an amazing project this looks like!

[Tim Wilson]

[Duke Sweden] “Everyone who ever answers my questions is nowhere to be found. I don’t recognize one name here. “

I’ve cross-posted this question to a number of forums, so I would imagine most people reading this thread will see some new names. 🙂

btw, this is just curiosity on my part, not “research” or anything. We tend to focus on specific problems (for obvious reasons), so I wanted to open up the floor for some more general, but generally on-topic, considerations.

So, with thanks to everyone for playing along, we continue….

[Shawn Miller] “My main acquisition formats are DNxHD (hopefully all DNxHR soon),Prores422 and Prores4444 from the Blackmagic Ursa Mini 4.6k, the 2.5k Cinema Camera or the Pocket Cinema Camera”

Cool! I was meaning to ask this from other folks posting upthread who are working with ProRes and DNxXX — is your footage being shot in those formats, or converted for post?

[Tim Wilson]

[Charlie Austin] “Movies. :-)”

So they handing you off reels of film?

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(For the indie noise nerds like me: Yo La Tengo, “Deeper Into Movies”)

[Tim Wilson]

[Andrew Kimery] “since I switched to mainly using PPro a couple of years ago I typically just grab the footage and get to work.”

This should go on a blurb somewhere I think!

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I don’t believe they have been implementing user requests, except where those already coincide with the design team’s established goals.”

This has ALWAYS been the case, or at least it was under Jobs. It was the one consistent theme in his career. He laid it out at length in a 1985 interview, going so far as to say that everything that was wrong with his competitors could be traced to their reliance on customer input. He reiterated it a number of times along the way, including a 2008 profile in Forbes, where he said that customer input is worthless because customers don’t know what’s coming. He does, said he.

I’m not saying that anyone on the pro apps team “doesn’t care” about customers or their input. That’s clearly not the case. They do care. But I think that their degrees of freedom to implement customer-driven changes are constrained by design practices that are etched in stone in Apple’s DNA.

Tim Cook is generally much more customer-focused, so their approach could change, but really, why should they change a thing? They take their successes in any area as a ratification of every one of their policies in all areas. There’s plenty of reasons that people have left the Apple fold over the years, but if there’s more than 5 or 6 who stomped off because Apple plays its cards close to the vest, I’d be shocked.

Apple customers reward Apple for being Apple. And that includes this.

[Steve Connor] “The mighty Apple will deliver something in their own good time, no point in moaning about it, let’s all count ourselves lucky when they do :)”

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[Tim Wilson]

I know that “a bridge too far” is the question…but is there any such thing anymore? It seems like there was a bridge too far a few years ago. X in itself for some people, but for more I think, the combination of X and the trash can. Indeed, some non-X users took that opportunity to leave Mac altogether.

But now? Disappointment over a late, lackluster almost-update is the most that Apple users can realistically hope for anymore. LOL With the silent (or not so silent) prayer, “Please don’t burn my favorite stuff to the ground.” LOL

“Again.” LOL

Mostly kidding, but that’s the flip side of the question. Barring Apple dropping macOS in favor of Windows or something outrageous, here, within the real world we’ve been living for the past 5 years, having come this far, can Apple honestly do anything to lose you for good?

I’m betting no. Even if you say yes. LOL If you ain’t gone now, you ain’t goin’ nowhere. Right?

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[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Like, 2 seconds after I sent this I got an email about Color Finale 1.5 being available for download.
“

Like the old bumper sticker says, “I feel so much better since I gave up hope.”