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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Jason says:
July 8, 2011 at 9:04 pm
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July 8, 2011 at 9:30 pm
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July 8, 2011 at 9:46 pm
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July 8, 2011 at 9:48 pm
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July 8, 2011 at 9:59 pm
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David Roth Weiss says:
July 9, 2011 at 12:26 pm
← Older Comments Newer Comments →Larry,
Answers to some of your questions if I was Phil Schiller:
1. Well we always discontinue previous versions when a new release is made available for purchase to make no confusion to the customer. If we had multiple versions on the shelf or in the App Store (the best way to find and buy new Software for your Mac) it would leave the customer asking what version should I buy? Selling only the current version is the least confusing and best marketing strategy for Apple Computer. Besides, why would you want to buy old software that will not work in future releases of Mac OS X and beyond (OS XI, OS XII – if we evolve beyond the OSX platform). We would never release an application that was not thoroughly tested, but with all software releases issues are found and we fix them in software updates along the way.
2. Apple created Final Cut Pro X for the majority of the world’s creative professionals (1,990,000 registered pro users of FCP 7). The approximately 10,000 high-end Film and TV editors that use FCP 7 and make up the minority will find Final Cut Pro X will meet their needs with the help of 3rd-Party developers and solution providers as it has always been in past releases of FCP. Any import/export of archaic forms of media will be best addressed by these 3rd-Party developers. Creating solutions for the high-end Film/TV industry is what they do best.
3. Although Apple no longer offers Final Cut Server, we will continue to support this application and workflow until a better solution is made available. Final Cut Server will work and continue to work for its installed base.
Take care, and keep on cutting on what ever platform you use.
Larry – This is the most articulate and concise explanation I have read of how Apple mishandled their PR. Very well done.
Larry,
Today I was showing to colleagues Final Cut Pro X (we work at high end TV Commercial Production Companies).
Before that the first comment I received from them was “I don’t like the interface, its too iMovie. There are almost no buttons”.
After showing them some “how to” in FCPX they changed their mind. They loved the metadata approach, the skimming, the color corrector, the audio plugins, the speed (processing speed, but editing speed too), etc.
Sure, it is not ready for some work yet, but let’s face it. It will.
The best thing that we can do as editors, is to learn as much as we can about FCPX techniques. If it doesn’t finally go pro. Bad luck. But if it will, we better be on the run sooner than later. Is like an investment where you don’t have too much to loose getting involved.
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, but don’t jump from the train too soon. That’s my thoughts about FCPX.
@ Greg:
For me it’s not the new interface, but rather the glaring omissions in OMF support that are keeping me away – and I don’t really see an elegant way around this issue.
(- As well as EDL, broadcast monitoring, lack of layered PSD file support, support for reconnecting offline media etc. etc.)
I’m not keen on paying Automatic Duck for a kludge workaround that I suspect will throw audio files out to ProTools in a disorganised fashion and take twice as long to achieve what is currently a straightforward operation.
This push for third parties to take up the slack of what should really be baked into the product just defies common sense. What happens if FCP X only ever reaches the enthusiast market? What third party is going to waste time and money developing pro features for a product that no one uses in a pro capacity?
Apple have made their bed and it was with the consumer in mind, not people like us.
Larry, thanks again for your excellent and thoughtful posts.
Larry, reading that Steve Jobs is getting involved means nothing now. And he wants to use third party developers to accomplish it???
For us, this is too little too late. We will keep using FC7 until we are up and running with Premier Pro. This is not Apple dropping the ball, this was a calculated move to try to gain market share by selling to a vast market of weekend users, and dropping the Pros. I think what they didn’t count on was how influential the small Pro crowd was. And that Adobe and the others are now about 1 year ahead of them in development. Have you seen a third party user book for FCPX yet? All the issues people have been having are being solved by other users in the blogosphere. Nothing from Apple yet.
And to make matters worse, the pros are helping the transition to other platforms… publicly… like this from Walter Biscard.
http://vimeo.com/25506555
Not to get lyrical here, but Leonard Cohen had some thoughts about this kind of arrogance in 1969. ….Who knew he was talking about Apple.
The Story of isaac
….”A scheme is not a vision
And you never have been tempted
By a demon or a god.
You who stand above them now,
your hatchets blunt and bloody…”
…”And if you call me brother now,
Forgive me if I inquire,
Just according to whose plan?”
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.