Re: Might Be An Interesting Read

Perhaps the whole thing was whole licensing thing was a knee jerk reaction to the fact that it was a licensing issue. Maybe the license was the more obvious one- that part of the code was based on MS code and that Jobs made an agreement with MS back in 99 that was for 10 years. There may have been an assumption that they could renew in 2009 but with Gates gone and the new strain between the 2 companies from the iPhone and Zune, perhaps Apple was seen as a threat and it wasn't renewed. Apple has to start from scratch, so they figure they might as well ditch the marketing dept. They figure they can be ready in a year or so and pay some exorbanant amount for an extension with MS, which expires sometime around June 30th 2011. Realizing that FCP X isn't ready, And that Steve is running on borrowed time, things are pushed into high gear and weird things like the supermeet occur. And, once it is released FCP classic is eol'd along with any other software built in any way on that code.

Along the way, they were getting very excited about the new directions they were headed and lost sight of pro users, since the goal was to make something new. I'm also guessing Randy didn't want to build Premiere a third time. Maybe back in '99 Jobs also made a 10 year agreement with Adobe that adobe would still make Photoshop. Recent strain over flash may have had Adobe threatening to pull PS unless they stop development of Final Cut. Maybe classic was also licensing some conventions from premiere/Adobe.

After the massive uproar over FCP X, Apple had its lawyers dig deep and decided they could sell existing copies via special phone order that but ramping back up the supply chain would be suspect.

Whatever it is, it's a secret that is being kept as well as any Apple secret to date.

On another note- we were happy with using Pages/Numbers until Lion came out. We bought MS Office because it has a "Save As" command. "Versions" is perhaps the most f'd up thing Apple has done in awhile.