Re: One Year Later, redux: Apple, FCPX and The Perfect Roll-out

[Herb Sevush] "Adobe and Avid among many others have managed to upgrade their basic software without destroying the workflow of their users. Apple chose not to, basically because Steve Jobs found it hard to edit his family's home movies. Now there's a great reason for change."

Upgrade yes. Transform no. Different approaches.

And I've never read a single thing about Steve Jobs ever editing a home movie.

Randy Ubillos noted that he was frustrated that iMovie was overly complex for a simple home vacation video edit - so he based part of the big re-write that became iMovie 08 on that premis.

But I don't recall SJ ever mentioning video editing in any quote I ever read.

SJ pretty much created Apple's unique 20th century business success by making it easier for people to get better results from their digital tools.

So actually, smart simplification has proved to be an extremely excellent reason for change - and one that vast numbers of people have rewarded with continued patronage.

What's proving problematic is designing software for a small elite cadre of users who's economic impact pales in relation to the development resources required to serve their niche requirements. For good or ill, fulfilling the software needs of the top 10% of working editors may not be a sustainable model for software development.

If I'm wrong, then Smoke and Premier should have a chance to inherit a nice chunk of 2 million Legacy users over the next couple of years. But evidence of that is extremely scant.

A drop from 54% o 52% as discussed in Phil Hodgetts recent quoted post here just isn't going to budge a needle enough to notice.

This is totally anecdotal but it came from a different but similarly well-connected friend at NAB. He asked me to guess how many seats of AVID they sold when they were offering their recent cross-grade deal to individual new retail customers.

His answer honestly shocked me. It was in the SINGLE digits. Like less than 10.

That's pretty scary if it's true.

And unless Premier is doing many many orders of magnitude better than that (and I honestly hope they are) how long can they support the constant and on-going development required of any software company faced with the pace of hardware revision we see today?

We'll know the truth as the years unfold I guess.

"Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions."-Justice O'Connor