[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “Users are a lot more forgiving of flaws when there is communication.”

Although Apple’s customers are the most forgiving that have ever strode the earth, no?

[Tim Wilson]

[Michael Gissing] “C’mon this was cheesy in 1984.”

The thread was started with a cheesy video, and I merely added one. This may be my first on-topic post for 2015, and it only took just over 8 months. I expect some credit for this.

Is nobody going to comment on Apple’s declaration of Apple II Forever And Ever?

[Tim Wilson]

How’s THIS for trippy? The music video for Apple II Forever! April, 1984, for the launch of the IIc.

Do yourself a favor. Watch this all the way through. If you haven’t taken drugs beforehand, you’ll definitely want drugs afterward.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcjlhFVTY50

Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!

This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.

[Tim Wilson]

Great article in The Verge suggests a couple of iPhones, the iPad Pro, a refreshed Apple TV, new Apple watchbands, iOS 9 and some other stuff.

Sounds like a lot, but it also sounds like enough to justify the biggest auditorium Apple has ever taken over.

And this one at Fortune, Why Apple’s iPad, Watch may outshine iPhone at its Sept. 9 event

Oh yeah, and the iPad Pro is rumored to include a stylus…which Jobs famously derided…but then again, he derided the idea of a tablet for years…anyway, my Samsung Galaxy Note has had a stylus since 2012 (maybe earlier, but that’s when I got mine), and I can tell you that you’ll dig it….

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “Are you proposing to buy content creation software futures?”

More like Forever Stamps. Tuck a few away for a rainy day, forget about ’em for a few years until you come across ’em while you’re digging in the back of that one kitchen drawer where you think you might have tucked the spare garage door opener.

[Tim Wilson]

I was working on my post while you fellas were going four more rounds. Copy-pasting, I’m willing to do. Edit, no. LOL Still mostly germane, and mine has memes.

+++++++++++++++++++++

[Oliver Peters] “BMD has far, far fewer software products to develop.”

They also don’t need software to do for BMD what software does for Adobe.

None of us will ever know for sure because BMD is privately held, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that, unlike Adobe, BMD is NOT the 7th-largest software company in the world.

Oh wait, and public vs. private.

Did I say public vs. private?

I meant private vs. public.

Neither of which has anything of use to inform the other.

Oh wait, and scale of use cases. You might think that this doesn’t factor into cost, but it’s HUGE. There’s a relatively small number of DaVinci and Fusion customers, and a relatively few ways that those customers use that software.

Relative to, say, Photoshop. Software so ubiquitous that there’s a verb. Tens of millions of users, I’m guessing. Even aside from teenagers making collages on tumblr, let’s make a list of the professional constituencies that Photoshop serves that are outside ours. I’ll start with medicine, law enforcement, and geology. Who wants to go next?

(And hey, ho, let’s go! A Joey Ramone collage from tumblr!)

I mean, we could play this game all day with any Adobe application.

There’s literally absolutely nothing in BMD’s experience that’s applicable to ANYONE. They’re the picture in the dictionary next to “sui generis,” right under the picture of Madonna.

And it’s more true for software than anything else. Blackmagic’s approach isn’t like anyone else’s.

Actually, except maybe a freemium app in the app store. Buy the pro version to remove the ads, or add 8K support, nbd.

We could say the same for Apple vs Adobe and Avid. How come Apple can sell an NLE for a couple hundred bucks? Because that’s all Apple needs for it to make. If they needed it to make more, they’d charge more.

I’ll stop now, but srsly.

[Oliver Peters] “[Bill Davis] “….the Adobe model is not the only viable one””

Has anybody ever said that? Nobody here. Certainly not Adobe.

The question has NEVER been whether it’s the ONLY viable strategy. Companies pursuing different strategies, even big, publicly-traded software companies, are as numerous as the sands along the shore.

Now, if you want to talk about something like if it’s viable for YOU, well, not much of a debate there. You’re the only authority on that.

But there’s also not much of a debate trying to compare is a private company with few software products balanced against an array of hardware, few use cases, etc., vs a public company that only sells software, and lots of it, to a stupefyingly wide range of customers.

At least apples and oranges are both fruit. This is more like apples and artichokes.

Or apples and cars, both of which can be used to keep doctors away, but not much else in common at all.

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Apple’s new long-form production division will surely run Media Composer on ISIS “

I’m no longer on top of this, but through the middle of the aughts, that was certainly true of Pixar.

[Craig Shields] “Hopefully Apple with AppleTV can make better deals. “

Not in the beginning, no. Maybe never.

The movie and TV studios have been very wary of getting in bed with Apple, because iTunes decimated their record labels, while making Apple rich. THe phrase I’ve heard many many times is that the studios are trying to avoid getting “iTuned” into oblivion.

For that matter, on the music side, Spotify was a hedge against Apple AND Amazon who were both pursuing the same model. It’s why labels were such big investors in Spotify from the beginning. Warners is thus far the only label to expose the numbers, but after being available in the US for only 4 years, streaming revenue has surpassed download revenue.

In Europe (where Spotify was founded and first made available), Spotify alone passed iTunes quite a while ago, which is what motivated Apple to spend $3 billion to acquire Beats. One of Apple’s main profit centers was bleeding too heavily to sustain.

Can you imagine what Netflix has done to, say, iTunes sales of downloaded seasons of Breaking Bad?

This has suited the studios just fine. The rise of Netflix, Amazon, and yes, Redbox, which is doing great business, has been embraced as an explicit hedge against getting “iTuned.”

The first thing to break the logjam for Apple moving into MUSIC streaming was Steve Jobs dying. A streaming deal was never going to happen while he was alive. He’d destroyed any kind of trust, and it was never going to be rebuilt.

Tim Cook has been very quietly spending years undoing Steve’s damage, not just here, but on many other fronts. But as much respect as Tim Cook has generated personally, and as much esteem as he has returned to Apple (which seriously, under Steve, had burned every bridge in every form of media, including books), there was still the bad taste that Apple had left in everyone’s mouth.

This has everything to do with why Apple TV has been so underwhelming even compared to Roku. It HAD to focus on the increasingly irrelevant iTunes ecosystem, for the same reason it HAD to add Netflix, YouTube, etc support. No matter how badly you want to, you can’t launch a programming platform without programming — and nobody out there was gonna sign new deals with Apple on new platforms.

Enter Jimmy Iovine.

Remember when Tim Cook said that a big part of the $3 billion to buy Beats was to buy Jimmy Iovine? It’s because he was a label guy. After a production career that included chart toppers for Lennon, Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Tom Petty, he founded Interscope Records (whose first big signing was Tupac Shakur, a BIG signing).

Interscope became Interscope Geffen A&M after a merger, which meant that when he came to Apple, HE’s the one with the credibility to say, “Guys, you know the deals we signed together at Beats, when I didn’t screw you, when you were happy? You remember when I got screwed by Apple the same way you did? Things have changed here. I’M here now, and I won’t let them screw you” — well now, NOW there’s something to talk about, and someone to talk about it with.

It should also be noted that in interviews NOW, Jimmy has acknowledged that he founded Beats hoping to bought by Apple. Good move for Jimmy AND Apple. Apple’s gonna make this $3 billion back in no time at all.

Jimmy also has credibility in movies. He produced soundtracks for movies going back to 16 Candles, and as a producer of movies (not just the soundtracks), he came out of the gate with the Oscar-winning 8 Mile.

So, he once again gets to say, “Guys, you know that I know what it’s like to sit on your side of the table. I used to sit right beside you. I know what it’s like to get screwed in these kinds of deals, and I won’t let it happen to you.”

Well well well, NOW we have something to talk about.

So yeah, what ALL these guys have realized — every cable channel, every platform, EVERYBODY — is that there’s a ceiling to the amount of money you can earn from somebody else’s stuff. You can spend a ton less on rights, and maximize viewer stickiness, if you give people a UNIQUE reason to watch.

Even YouTube just over a month ago hired Susanne Daniels, former head of programming at MTV to develop original programming. Laugh all you want about “they don’t play videos anymore” and “their reality programming brought down the whole industry” but their SCRIPTED programming under her direction has blossomed into some of the smartest and sharpest anywhere on TV.

ALLLLLLL of which is to say, yeah, this was inevitable….but it wasn’t gonna happen without Jimmy Iovine, which neither Tim Cook nor Jimmy Iovine will likely put that bluntly…but they’ve certainly both danced around saying it, and it’s easily demonstrably the case.

I’m just looking forward to shows getting released before they’re ready, and fans jumping up and down and saying, “But it’s supposed to be like that and besides Apple always releases things before they’re ready and they just keep getting better until they’re eventually just like they should have been before they released it in the first place and JUST YOU WAIT.”

[Tim Wilson]

[Walter Soyka] “Instead of squeezing their customers until they’re gone, Adobe can continuously monetize their subscriber base by layering additional products and services on top of the core CC offering, for additional fees. “

See Fotolia: Adobe spent $800 million to buy it (in cash no less) and there’s been no increase to offset. The belief is that it will add enough value, with enough ease of use and access, that the investment will monetize itself with in-app purchases.

To Oliver’s point disputing the notion that price increases are inevitable, there’s no model anywhere in this industry for that being the case. Not cameras, not storage, not I/O, not standards converters, not switchers, and definitely not software. It just doesn’t happen. Ever.

Am I wrong about this? Can anyone point to even one example? I’m sure somebody can, but I absolutely cannot.

(Cell phones and cable bills aren’t anywhere near this industry’s product lineup, so I don’t think I’m being reasonable to exclude them.)

The risk that people describe is real enough to be worth talking about, but not realistic for Adobe to actually DO. A subscription model has no friction on the way out for anyone but the handful of people who NEED access to a no-longer-supported version years from now. Those people obviously exist, and at least two of them who ACTUALLY do this, rather than stating a theoretical concern or philosophical stand, regularly post here. Their concerns are both valid and accurate, and not at all to be trifled with…

…but well outside mainstream use cases. So those folks should indeed not go this route, but for the rest of the world, it’s easy enough to fit this into the toolbox….and easy enough to leave if the price gets out of hand, the value is no longer there, or because something more compelling comes along.

But with Adobe needing to keep customers around for four years and three months to equal the price of one new box of CS with no upgrades, it’s in their interest to keep up the pace, keep the quality within normal ranges, keep adding value, and NOT raising the price.

The subscription model isn’t at all new, even in this industry, and certainly in other industries, but significant price increases for anything related to this industry are all but unprecedented.

Right?

[Tim Wilson]

[Gary Huff] “Because given the choice between a creative toolset and your cable subscription, well, of course, you absolutely need cable.”

Without commenting on John’s post, you jest (I think), but I found this to be the case when I was enticing people to subscribe to cable in the early 80s. I still had to explain to people what it was (no sir, nothing to buy — you just pay monthly, and when you’re ready to stop paying, we just come get the box).

Frankly, back then, there wasn’t much else to explain. No ESPN yet (it had been founded, but not widely available — the only real sports channel was WTBS!!! And nobody in Texas gave a shit about the Braves or Falcons, I assure you), no Disney Channel (my boss left to be their first salesguy), no CNN, no Weather Channel (our local office pointed a camera at an old school radar screen), and obviously nothing that came along after 1982.

So one day, I was following a lead from somebody who called in wanting to know more. I rolled down a dirt road, pulled up to a house with a bowed roof, no front door, a car up on blocks, in a neighborhood tightly packed with similar houses and, classist bastard that I was, I thought, no way, this can’t be right.

There was an old man on the porch with eyes completely clouded over by glaucoma, and he called out, “Who’s there?” When I told him, he was practically giddy.

I didn’t ask the obvious question (WHAT TH—-???), but he said even before I could ask: “For less than the cost of a single trip to McDonald’s for me, my wife, and four kids, I get a whole month’s worth of TV, and keep the kids in the house and out of trouble. Maybe even some other people’s kids too. The whole neighborhood gets safer and more pleasant because *I* have cable. Of course what’s most important to me is MY kids. I can just keep my kids under the roof a little longer –”

–and he leans forward —

“– where I can keep AN EYE ON THEM” as he points to his cloudy eyes and laughs. And he signed up for everything we had.

I bring up this long story to underscore Aindreas’s point that, if it’s awesome, you pay for it, and the price you pay for CS is (thanks to inflation) still less than a couple of fast food meals.

And when you stop paying for it, it goes away, nbd.

I do get why somebody would rather not go that route, but I really don’t think this is quite the sea change that most people are making it out to be, especially in the world of Avid where leased equipment is still common. Stop paying, and it goes away. Maybe this year’s projects can be opened later, maybe not. But you keep paying because it’s not much money (four years and three months of leasing to equal one purchase with no upgrades), and you assume you’ll be in business in four years.

Your mileage, your number of kids, the frequency of your fast food, and the degree of your glaucoma may vary.

[Tim Wilson]

[Mark Suszko] “I thought about what the most appropriate metaphors might be.
“

Cars. Always and only cars. I have no idea what you were thinking.

LOL