[Walter Soyka] "I don't quite understand what you're getting at here. You're suggesting there are lessons to be learned from the "wider world of editing," right? What are they?"
I was making a somewhat different point. The specific lesson of these numbers, I think, is "Just because a narrative (about e.g. FCP X's failure) dominates Internet discussion of a subject doesn't necessarily mean that narrative has any relationship to reality".
But to sort of address your point, I think there's massive value in FCP X being designed to encompass a wider market than pro NLEs might have traditionally targeted. There's a notion commonly floated here that software designed primarily for high-end specialty markets is inherently going to be better for people in those markets. But the history of computing furnishes numerous examples of the opposite. Larger markets tend to generate more total revenue than specialty markets, allowing for investment of more developer resources. Larger markets tend to be more competitive, driving innovative new features. They tend to be more diverse, driving flexibility. And they tend to contain less expert users, driving usability.
There is, in fact, a very strong historical tendency (with hardware as well, actually) for mass-market products to annihilate specialty market products when they come into direct contact. Apple's "mass market first" approach to FCP X is has been widely perceived as a weakness for the product, a reason for high-end users to avoid it and to mistrust its future. But I see a fairly recent analogy between FCP X and Avid (to a lesser extent even Premiere) that suggests precisely the opposite -- iPhone vs. BlackBerrry in the enterprise.
Four years ago, the narrative about iPhone in the enterprise was much like the narrative about using FCP X for high-end work today. It was missing basic enterprise management features! It was a consumer toy! Meanwhile, off in the consumer market, the iPhone was winning over a lot of fans -- people who'd never previously owned a smartphone of any kind. It was also building a massive ecosystem around itself. As Apple began to add enterprise features, a lot of the iPhone's new fans started demanding to use them as work phones -- and a lot of existing enterprise users saw that value in iPhone's ecosystem.
The same is likely to happen with FCP X. Effective tools and workflows will likely develop around it simply because of how widely used it is. People who learn on FCP X now will want to take it with them if (when) they move upmarket later — and it's already well on its way to building out a feature set that will let them do so. While Avid is off "focusing on the enterprise", the army Apple is presently building in the mid-range market is going to be slowly marching toward the world's post facilities.
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