[ronsuss] "Avid does indeed need to streamline and focus and the decision to not be at NAB may allow them to do just that. None the less it is fueling rumors and speculation about the future of Avid in general and lets face it, everyone gets a good ten year run in this industry and if you don't keep up with the demands of your clients and the changes in technology you go away, no matter how entrenched you are in the industry."
Most of the people discussing this and crying out "The End IS Near!" are not Avid customers. Of those that are "Avid" customers, they seem to be largely those who own either Xpress or Liquid -- hardly Avid's "core" market.
If Avid had never released Xpress or acquired Liquid, they be be hardly much different than they are right now, as Avid's real business is far from either Xpress or Liquid.
That is not to insult either product or the users of them, it is just that I'd rather buy into where a company is firmly entrenched rather than where they are merely scratching the surface of a market.
Example?
Why yes, I do have one as a matter of fact...
Back when I bought my first Media 100 v1.2 back in 1994, Avid had a product called Avid Media Suite Pro.
Many of my friends that I knew back then who were aware of the nonlinear systems and had been working with Toasters and other systems, recommended that I put my money on Avid. They told me I should get a Media Suite Pro.
But I had been in the aerospace industry for a while and knew of Data Translation (who originated the Media 100) and so I told my friends that these people at DT were the ones that taught the CIA how to compress, acquire and broadcast images from satellites out in the Clark Orbital Belt. I gambled that Media 100 would have the suds -- and they did, for years. At the time that Avid users were arguing that you couldn't online with a nonlinear system and that "...that is why companies have invented EDL software, dummy" -- me and all my Media 100 friends like Nick Griffin, Tim Wilson and others were working with a system that could online.
It was where Media 100 put all their focus. It was all they did at the time. We got all their attention -- well, until they lost focus years later, thinking that they could become iMovie or something.
Our "money-spent equals" who gambled on the entry-level Avids at the time? They fared not so well, as Avid didn't pay much attention to Media Suite Pro users. (I converted many of them to Media 100 users and made quite a business for a while out of consulting with these users.)
Do people weight their options rightly? Not really, as it happened again.
Later Avid acquired Plum and took the Plum editor into Avid and made it into a short-lived product called Avid MCXpress, as I recall. In a company that was largely almost entirely Windows at the time, a few intrepid souls began buying MCXpress for Windows. Smartest move these buyers ever made? Probably not. It wasn't long and MCXpress was gone and Avid was trying to upgrade these users from a $10,000 to $15,000 system to Avid's real products, that were $100,000 and up. Did many bite? I don't know of one that I ever knew.
For a short while, I used an Avid Xpress Elite that ran on Mac -- the Windows version of this one was much better -- and liked it for a while. But Avid, once again, didn't pay their lower-end tools a lot of attention.
I had gambled that as the market grew, Avid would realize that with greater numbers they could make a lot of money at the more entry-level of their systems base. But I lost that gamble as both Avid and Autodesk/Discreet realized that chasing $1,000 systems didn't make much sense for them.
The $1,000 strategy works for many companies but not for companies that are geared the way that Avid, Discreet and others are geared.
If I were to consult with Avid again today, I would recommend that they take hard looks at how best to use Pinnacle as their lower-end. Move Liquid back to Pinnacle. Make it the rocket-engine of that line, not the bastard step-child to the Avid line.
Take a lesson from SGI -- who scrapped plans to release video monitor boards that would have trounced ATI and nVidia in the market -- SGI said that they didn't want to compete between themselves. So they didn't.
The lesson?
A multi-billion dollar industry happened in which they had no part. But one which they could have owned.
Instead, SGI has faded into obscurity and is a shadow of its one-time glory and prominence in the market.
There are two lessons in this post:
- As a user, make sure that you buy into a company's core business as it will get their real attention. (Step-children only rarely get the real inheritance and affection.)
- As a company, don't be afraid to gamble your teams against one another. (If SGI had done so, they would likely be driving all of our monitors right now and sitting on a wad of cash, instead of watching most all they had float away in the changing winds of the market.)
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net
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