Re: @Andrew Richards

[Ronald Lindeboom] "Edit was tired, long in the tooth and was losing Autodesk money. It would have needed a complete rewrite from the ground-up. Hell, it didn't even support DV or any of the then-popular formats that crawled out of the low-end and pushed their way into the market. Autodesk had a tough decision to make on Edit and I think they made the right one. It's what I would have done had I been at the helm of the company. Sales and monies did not justify keeping it alive.

Was it a cool program in its day? By all means. But beyond that it would have been just plain bad business to keep it on life support. Pulling the plug is what it needed and what it got."

Ron, part of the cause of edit losing money was first discrete's and then Autodesk's terrible marketing and over pricing of the product. This was a constant in feedback to them from the community but it had no effect. Whether it was because they were marketing-challenged or didn't wish to cut into the sales of Smoke no one in authority has ever said. Though the private conversations people have had over the years seem to point to both.

Yes, it needed an expensive re-write and I don't fault them so much for killing it, even if it was on account of mismanagement, as much as for what they did before and after: Paul Lypachevsky's standing up in front of 300 or so edit* users at NAB and saying it wasn't even being considered. This, two months before he pulled the plug. I was sitting in the second row and could see him trembling as he made that speech. And I didn't think it was from nervousness about public speaking. Then, after the deed was done, and a small group was talking to them about purchasing the code, drawing out the negotiations until after the next NAB to prevent the negative feelings about discrete from erupting on the NAB floor. It was all very cynical and tawdry.

As Tim has pointed out elsewhere, the people at the company may be completely different today, but companies carry their karma along with their name. Autodesk never attempted to make right with edit users, aside from offering a modest discount on Smoke, I believe, that I don't think anyone ever took them up on.

You are to be commended for carrying the edit users forum for a few years after the fact. It was as lively as the FCPX, The Debate forum, is today, for many of the same reasons: users, cast away by a corporate decision, investigating future possibilities, while venting their collective spleens, and eventually moving on.

David
AllinOneFilms.com