Tim Wilson
3
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Bret Williams] “a! Don’t know if you’re being facetious but since it’s right here on the shelf…”
Holy shit! Not facetious at ALL!!!
I confess that I slept through Zeppelin in the 70s (the nerds I ran with were all into prog LOL), but my then-girlfriend, now-wife turned me onto Zeppelin in the early 80s. And as my joke indicates, the conversion took. I wasn’t kidding in the LEAST that I have a folder full of Jimmy Page theremin pictures.
Anyway, my wife skipped her prom to see them on the 77 tour, and is TOTALLY a Jimmy Page fan, no respect at all for the Plant crowd. LOL That said, her favorite guitarist is Pete Townshend — she played a Gibson Les Paul Junior like the one Pete used on Who’s Next, and she has plenty of love for Roger Daltrey.
We started dating because of a shared love of music. Her taste was much cooler than mine of course, but 32 years later, we’re still rock and rolling together.
When I told her about your yearbook last night, she howled. We were both pretty straight-laced (her Pete Townshend-Jimmy Page fixation notwithstanding) and neither one of us could imagine having the balls, OR the WIT, to do something like this in high school.
I just showed her this picture picture just now and she HOWLED. She agrees — coolest thing ever.
Dude, you’re my hero. Thanks for showing me this!
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[Bret Williams] “I can one up you on that. My high school yearbook actually says “Jimmy Page” embossed on the cover. The form asked how you wanted your name to read on the cover so I put down Jimmy Page.”
The coolest thing I have ever heard in my life. EVER.
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[Bill Davis] ” And that manufacturer may have other products that DO generate enough margin to support a dozen small things that don’t.”
Amazon’s play in a nutshell. Create reflex ordering, so that, in your mind, the gap between a couple of sponges for the kitchen and a 60″ TV for the wall becomes virtually non-existent. Throw in Prime so you can watch Transparent, and the illusion of free shipping reduces the friction even further.
It works for me. I have indeed bought both sponges and TVs from Amazon, and I order from them often enough that they’re losing money on my Prime membership. But the margin on the rest of it more than covers the difference. They’re making plenty from me as a whole, even if not on every single product.
It’s also the model for Kindle, and I’d guess for Echo (which they should have named Alexa!!!!) too. Spread the loss across the company to offset by a million other transactions.
This is nothing new of course. Hence the concept of “loss leader.” There are indeed entire companies built this way.
Supply chain is an especially interesting window on this. Part of the object of the game is to disrupt the other guy’s chain.
One way this played out was with New Coke. Supposedly a flop, it did several things at once. First, it could use things like Max Headroom to deflate Pepsi’s image as “hip” without leaving Coke’s admittedly square traditional audience behind. More important, it took up shelf space, pushing other vendors (including Pepsi) off those shelves. And once New Coke went away, its space was taken by other Coke products….
…making New Coke one of the greatest successes in the history of grocery retail.
With all this stuff, you have to know which game you’re looking at to know who’s winning.
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[Joseph W. Bourke] “trackless editing is the theramin.”
OMG, this forum has officially justified its entire existence.
Not that theremin operators can’t be totally badass. If you ask me politely I MIGHT tell you why I have a folder of pictures of Jimmy Page playing the theremin…but I do in fact have a folder of pictures of Jimmy Page playing the theremin.
We could certainly add playing violin with a bow to this simile, but I think we can agree that, ultimately, Jimmy Page’s badassitude derives from the theremin and bow being parts of a much larger skillset.
And wardrobe.
Signed, as I wrote in my junior high notebook oh so many times,
Mrs. Jimmy Page
Mrs. Jimmy Page
Mrs. Jimmy Page
Mrs. Jimmy Page
Mrs. Jimmy Page -
[Christian Schumacher] ” the only thing they did was to give X a ten year life plan.”
…of which we’ve just entered Year 5.
It’s worth noting that, midway through FCP’s 12-year life, all of its major features were more or less in place. Multicam was the last big one, in 2005.
Pro Res came 2 years later of course, but, not to diminish its importance, it’s a bit of a stretch to call it a feature. More of a codec, or at best a workflow support platform.*
This is pretty typical of Apple’s pattern. Ship wet, dry quickly with front-loaded development, then solidify on a slow march offstage.
Following the same pattern, there might be one more major feature plus a workflow enhancement along the way, but really, barring an unprecedented shift in strategy, we’ve seen juuuuuust about all the major feature development from X that we’re likely to see.
For the multitudes, the current feature set is clearly enough. Godspeed to you, my friends, with highest hopes for Send to Motion someday.
(Is Send to Motion a feature or a workflow enhancement? I’m thinking “feature,” and I’d be fine if this was the last major feature to be implemented before we say goodbye.)
However, the contrast with the scope, scale, and pace of Adobe’s development couldn’t possibly be more stark.
*It’s worth noting that Pro Res was a variation on DNxHD, which Avid released 4 years earlier. Same compression technology, same workflow…oops, except Apple forgot to support alpha channels.
So, following the same pattern, whichever new workflow paradigm Apple will introduce in the next phase of X’s life already exists somewhere else, and will be implemented with at least one important component missing. LOL
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[Charlie Austin] “[Jeremy Garchow] “But now, all my supposed business emails look like dear ole Edna’s.”
Don’t worry Jeremy, when 9.1 (and El Capitan) drop, you’ll get this to make up for it… :-)”
That’s an email from my aunt in a nutshell. Comic Sans and a raised middle finger.
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Yo APPL, Comic Sans is a MICROSOFT font.
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1) [Andrew Kimery] “I agree it’s about selling shared storage”
2) [Andrew Kimery] “as opposed to customers being in an ‘either stay with Avid/ ISIS or we switch to XYZ NLE on ABC storage’ and possibly choosing to ditch Avid/ISIS for other vendors.”
I see those as two different things…the third of which I think is the key.
Avid has never had any illusions about selling Unity to non-Avid customers. They don’t even have any illusions about selling Unity to every Avid customer. Hence the (terrible, terrible) move to buy (the terrible, terrible) Medea. It was never going to have “Unity” features, but would offer cheap, Avid-owned storage, a la cheap, Avid-owned M-Audio speakers.
(Side note: I have no idea what kind of due diligence Avid performed before that terrible, terrible deal, but it clearly did not involve reading Creative COW. There’s no way they’d have looked at the COW and closed that deal.)
Avid has also never been under the illusion that their customers only use Avid stuff. After Effects had towered over the rest (don’t forget: Automatic Duck was created as MC-AE interchange; the rest came later), but by the middle of the last decade, a meaningful number of Avid customers had added FCP to the mix.
(Hence also my observation that the defection from MC to FCP is greatly exaggerated, missing out on the truth that is so, so, so true today: there is RARELY only one major toolset in a shop.)
This is why Avid supported FCP on Unity 10 years ago, After Effects, Premiere (my guess: the #1 after AE, yes?), and so many others.
So, in fairness to the (not entirely unfair) shit Avid gets given for cluelessness, their Unity/ISIS approach EXACTLY followed their customers experience of NEEDING multiple tools to work on their shared storage.
Forestalling any either-or eventuality for current Avid customers is the goal of course…but really, the primary customers for ANY Avid products are CURRENT Avid customers. MC software is expanding the circle a bit, to be sure…but I really can’t imagine anyone at Avid imagining they’ll sell Avid storage to non-Avid customers.
This, btw, is why Avid feels strongly, and I believe correctly, that when it comes to understanding Avid’s business model, it doesn’t matter how much money Avid makes from hardware. Without Media Composer, there’s ZERO value proposition for ANY Avid hardware. No MC, then barring Pro Tools, no need for anything else from Avid either.
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My point was just to be a wisenheimer. Wisenheimer is my native tongue.
I’m on record from the day they did it that Apple’s approach of immediately going all in on X was exactly the right one. If Apple had ever awoken from a 3-day drunken bender, found themselves with a “Kiss Me I’m Apple” tattoo on their forehead, and no idea who was stupid enough to hire me, I’d have told them the same thing, repeatedly, and much too loudly for their hungover state until Apple security disappeared me for good.
Simply, a company with a foot in two canoes risks falling in the river. Either you’re committed to the future you believe in, and put all your resources toward getting there, or you’re not really committed. And if you’re not really committed, why bother at all? That’s why my advice to companies, people, and small dogs is always “Get out of your own way.”
This is why I also wholeheartedly endorse Adobe’s move. I’m also on record being a fan of subscription-only, but WHATEVER they believed their disruptive future to be, if they can implement now, they SHOULD implement it now. Frontload the disruption. It’s always self-defeating to hold off your own future.
Of course, if Sony’s goal is to keep two applications alive because they can’t or don’t want to translate all the key features of the old one to the new one, or they really do want to cultivate two audiences, well then, they’re already carrying out their plan, and I wish them godspeed.
But if they’re trying to “learn” from Apple’s experience by pulling off the band-aid as slowly as possible, I’d say that they’re taking the wrong lesson.
That said, Sony has wisely chosen not to share their internal dynamics or future plans with me, but I’ve never let the absence of facts deter me from having strong opinions.
I should note that I really like Vegas (although not its unfortunate name so much). I think it has always been given short shrift by Mac users who’ve never taken the time to see what it can do. Not that it would convert them, but hey, this is a cool field, and Vegas is one of the cooler things in it. I’ve never understood not wanting to see it all, even if I’ll never use it.
But mostly I just saw the opportunity for a joke that I couldn’t pass up.
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Hmmm,introducing the new, nimble thing….while continuing to nurture the deep-featured, well-loved, and widely adopted thing… whose fans have nonetheless been itching for its modernization….
…and the company, hoping to build attachment as current users can see for themselves the advantages of the new approach as it continues to mature, will allow users to choose the right balance between innovation and proven depth that makes the most sense for THEM….while the company continues its clearly stated plans for the future….
Nah. Never gonna work.
