Re: @Real World Editing: From Avid to FCP and Back Again

[Don Walker] "After reading the biography, I have to believe that the overall FPCX design, the behavior at NAB, and the resulting killing off of FCS, were a direct result of Steve's way of doing things."

I couldn't agree more. This was EXACTLY in keeping with the philosophy that guided him from the beginning.

I wrote about this in my tribute to his passing, which you can find here.

In the context of the article as a whole, I mention that I ran the piece by my father, who worked with Steve from 1979-1985, and looks back on it as one of the best parts of his life. He says I got this right, which I wasn't surprised to hear. I quoted Steve.

Emphasis added here to highlight why I think Don is reading Steve's bio, and his decisions around FCPX, EXACTLY right.

In a 1985 interview, at 29 and still at Apple, Steve said, "[W]e didn't build Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research."

In fact, Steve openly mocked IBM for their reliance on market research, citing it as the primary evidence that they had no pride in their own work. If they did, said Steve, they wouldn't have made PCjr. And what was so wrong with PCjr? "It seems clear to me that they were designing that on the basis of market research for a specific market segment, for a specific demographic type of customer."

While nobody should be held in their 50s to what they said at 29 -- and Steve was surely oversimplifying for effect -- his approach remained remarkably consistent. A 2008 profile of Apple in Fortune observed, "Apple scoffs at the notion of a target market. It doesn't even conduct focus groups. 'You can't ask people what they want if it's around the next corner,' says Steve Jobs."

Is any of this sounding familiar yet? No? How about this: when challenged in that 1985 interview that the new Mac left its entire customer base "with incompatible, out-of-date products," Steve replied that compatibility with the past was “too limiting. [W]e needed a technology that would make the thing radically easier to use and more powerful at the same time, so we had to make a break. We just had to do it.”

Let’s review. Sacrificing compatibly for their own idea of increased simplicity and power, explicitly rejecting the value of customer input because Apple knows the future and customers don’t. Creating only for themselves, equating pride in their work with disregard for specific market segments, their work judged as successful only by themselves.

NOW is this sounding familiar?

Again, in context, please note that I said a lot of NICE stuff about Steve too, but the fact is that he openly mocked the idea of listening to customers, in unambiguous language, from before there was any such thing as a Mac. He had no use for customer input, and no use for anyone who valued it.

This worked in a lot of ways, but geezers like me who were around for all of this know that every one of those changes left large swaths of the existing customer base behind. He was willing to nuke his existing customer base over and over, to build his future customer base.

As for the negative reaction to FCPX, I doubt that the team expected it, but I doubt that they thought much about it in advance either. If they were still working for Steve after any length of time, they had adopted meaningful parts of his philosophy, the core of which has been from the very, very beginning, "We built it for ourselves."

A specialized market has specific needs, though. Needs that may not coincide with Apple's intuition, or what they think is interesting or beautiful. If it works for you, it works. If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't. It's all good. You were never specifically in the plan, ever. Not in 1999, not in 2011. "We built it for ourselves."