Like many of you, I’ve been losing sleep this last week trying to figure out what’s going to happen to my business after the debacle of the Final Cut Pro X launch.
I read in a blog last night that Steve Jobs has gotten involved in this mess and that “really great things will be happening really soon.”
So my first question is: “Why does Steve Jobs need to get directly involved in what is essentially a straight-forward upgrade to one of their well-established products?”
And this led me to a bigger thought: “Who’s Accountable?”
As I woke up this morning, I had a day-dream of Phil Schiller, VP of Worldwide Marketing, appearing on my podcast, the Digital Production Buzz, to answer questions from listeners.
(In reality, this will never happen. Apple stopped giving on-the-record interviews, with the exception of Mr. Jobs, many years ago.)
So, imagining that Mr. Schiller were on the program, here are the questions I would ask:
1. What was the benefit to Apple of immediately canceling Final Cut Studio (3) with the release of a brand-new and untested product; when there was no technical reason (according to Apple) to do so?
2. Why did Apple feel it was necessary to alienate one of their most passionate fan bases with this release; were professional users that expendable?
3. What responsibility does Apple have when canceling a product to companies that built businesses around those products in terms of notification and support?
4. Conversely, what does Apple require of its vendors, when a supplier to Apple decides to modify a manufacturing method?
5. What is the benefit to Apple for assuming a strict rule of silence whenever something goes wrong? (A short period for research is understandable, but not when it stretches for weeks. The number one rule of PR is communication – but, apparently, not for Apple.)
6. Conversely, what would Apple’s reaction be if one of its vendors, say FoxConn, refused to talk to Apple when something went wrong, such as an explosion?
7. Why is Apple unwilling to provide a general roadmap to those products it considers “professional”?
8. Conversely, what would Apple’s reaction be if Intel refused to tell it about new chips it was developing?
9. Trust is a very tricky thing. It takes time to create and can be destroyed in an instant. Does Apple perceive the extent to which it has breached this trust and what will Apple do to recover from it?
Not one of these questions deals with the features of a product. They deal with the moral character of a company.
As consumers, we are held accountable through license agreements, laws, and regulation.
But who holds corporations accountable?
The sad part is that no one holds corporations accountable. We will never learn these answers. And the damage that’s been done will be irreparable.
Larry
66 Responses to Who's Accountable?
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John X. Joyce says:
July 8, 2011 at 10:50 pm
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Nivardo says:
July 8, 2011 at 11:44 pm
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Alex says:
July 9, 2011 at 3:15 am
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Wayne says:
July 9, 2011 at 9:14 am
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David Roth Weiss says:
July 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm
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DiegoB says:
July 9, 2011 at 2:39 pm
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Peter says:
July 9, 2011 at 3:46 pm
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Shawn says:
July 9, 2011 at 5:44 pm
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Techwizard says:
July 9, 2011 at 7:12 pm
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Bill Dawson says:
July 9, 2011 at 9:47 pm
← Older Comments Newer Comments →I offer a humble analogy aimed at jogging Steve’s memory. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”, as Mark Twain observed.
Consider the spreadsheet. It is Excel that explains the corporate dominance of Microsoft. Every slave in his cubicle uses it, 99 per cent in quite simple ways. There are almost embarrassingly low-end uses: my wife, for instance, uses is as a clunky database for her recipes.
Yet Excel has an extraordinary range of high-end capablilities, from statistics to engineering. At the stratospheric end there are expensive third-party plug-ins for modelling, for example, where the spreadsheet might take hours to run. How did it get there? Not by a paradigm shift in how the application worked. It still works pretty much as it did on DOS.
Steve, of all people, will recall an impressive but failed attempt at a paradigm shift of the spreadsheet. Lotus created Improv, a 3D spreadsheet. Sounds good, huh? It ran only on the NeXT box at first. In fact some people bought Steve’s NeXT machine just to run Improv. But the 3D spreadsheet did not catch on in the end, at any level. Many years later, it was Jean-Louis Gassée, if memory serves, who developed a node-based spreadsheet. I tried it. It was interesting, but…
With Microsoft the paradigm shift was in the OS, the change to a GUI, and not, to emphasise the point, in the application. The early Excel on Windows was a thing only a mother could love – like the early, hair-tearing versions of Premiere on the Mac. But Microsoft persisted, adding feature after feature and other improvements, continually broadening the user base, rather than marooning sections of it.
My argument is that Steve now has a new, but home-grown, Lotus Improv on his hands, unless he moves at the speed of light.
Apple needs to update the FCP 7 and not us. What they wanted to know, but they decided to make the change. We are not lab rats, people who are working with a tool that we used to work and support our families. TV commercials do not need to make movies of my weekends, but I have to deliver my work on Betacam SP, DVCAM and XDCAM. I’m not in the industry of films, the FCP does not suit me well. A concept that is not useful to me Events, What Events? Now be called a commercial event? Daily produce TV commercials for four days with at least two versions each. It is impossible to do with FCP X, I tried.Why a Lego toy entertains more than a monoblock? Freedom to create.
Very, very valid questions. After the discontinuation of the Xserve line and only a few months later with Final Cut X the 2nd. I wonder what’s going on at Apple? They have chosen to learn it the hard way, which is that you can’t deal with pro markets like consumer markets, or as Larry wrote: “7. Why is Apple unwilling to provide a general roadmap to those products it considers “professional”?”
The damage in all companies that have invested a lot now obsolete products is quite huge. It will take years until to repair that damage. I wonder if Apple is still committed to us.
Wow. What an overall enlightening post this has turned out to be for me! Until I read your very succinct list of questions, I was still on Apple’s side 100%. I still hope they pull it together, because I personally like the direction of FCPX, yet I can see more clearly now of the problems. Thanks.
Question number 8, in particular, hit me the hardest. Up until then I sort-of excused them for their silence. When I started thinking in the terms of the Apple/Intel relationship and how it compared to the Apple/User relationship, it was definitely an eye-opener. Then Creech pulled it altogether with the amateur/pro comment and sealed it.
Integrity is everything, and Larry Jordon has proven that he personifies it.
There just aren’t many people in the world who receive “the keys to the kingdom” who would be willing to risk the power and privilege that affords them for any reason, whatever it might be. Larry knows the risks and knows how very high the stakes are, yet he has proven that he’s willing risk it all, by doing the right thing.
The outcome of this situation is far from certain, however I assure you all, Larry’s willingness to standup for FCP and for all of us, has more potential to effect a positive outcome than anything we could possibly hope for.
Well done Larry! Keep up the good work. I’m glad you have my back. If I can ever do the same for you, count on me.
David
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David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
David is a contributing editor for CreativeCOW.net and contributes to Creative COW magazine with popular articles drawn from his industry experience. You can also find David hosting Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, FCP X, and Business & Marketing forums.
Some companies make software to sell hardware, and others make software to sell value.
Is this saying that MacPros are next to be EOL?
Maybe Steve Jobs attended a board meeting at Disney? With 2700 FCP seats and an all tape workflow I’m pretty sure they have some interesting opinions about FCP X… 😉
@John X. Joyce
I think your comments are spot on… I just want to follow on with a few thoughts.
“It is Excel that explains the corporate dominance of Microsoft”
True, but Excel is just part of the story. It was MS’ realization that these apps (Excel, Word, Access) should work together as a suite of tools that share data, that made it popular in the business world.
I think this is where Adobe has been getting it right since CS2. They’ve worked steadily on stability, performance and integration and it shows… they even manage to (consistently) add useful new features to already popular applications (content aware fill in PhotoShop for instance). Truthfully, I thought this was where Apple was going… I thought FCS4 was going to be all 64bit applications (FCP, Color, STP, DVDSP) with a unified UI and a tightly integrated work flow. At least, that’s what would have made sense to me…
Shawn Miller
Bravo Larry, #9 slams it home for me. Trust is gone.
Next is Logic X. Revolutionary new music production. We have done away with tracks cause you dont need to think and work like that anymore. We know better. Just try it our way. You will learn to like it. BTW OMF, WAV, MP3 output coming soon from 3rd parties for $499 for you Pros.
I’m moving on.
>If you own a facility, it’s another story. You don’t need to go to Avid or >Premiere overnight. FCP7 still works. Get an Avid, a Premiere and FCPX >and do tests in order to get ready for the future
Except, it’s a different case at the university level. Yes, our FCP7 works fine but we are now teaching a dead product. That forces a change! We can not go to FCPX because it’s not ready yet. We bought Avid for the film and television production students and will use Premiere for the multimedia students. Although they can use either, if they wish.
Last time we had two programs (Avid version 3.0 and FCP) we taught both programs and let the students decide what they wanted to use. In reality, we were studying them to see what they were using and why.
FCP won.
So now we start again with Avid and Premiere. Let’s see…where is my notebook?
Bill