POST Magazine "Of Apples and Avids: The Cautionary Tale of FCP X"
written by Jonathan Moser from POST Magazine:
Even as I write, this unprecedented (in our industry) drama is still unfolding. Not since the "New Coke" debacle of 1985 has one company raised so much furor and alienated so many with a product change. But the situation with Final Cut Pro X is not a simple case of a flavor gone wrong...as one blogger pointed out, these are people's livelihoods one company has decided to play with.
By this point it doesn't matter whether FCP X is "awesome" as Mr. Jobs said in an email in April of 2010, what matters is the question of how one company so used to getting it right, got it so dismally wrong.
Item: A new cottage industry enabling Final Cut editors to migrate to Avid or Adobe has formed throughout the industry.
Item: Third-party vendors have publicly acknowledged (in carefully written prose) how Apple's secrecy and inflexibility has affected their ability to continue supplying and/or developing product for Final Cut Pro X.
Item: Both Adobe and Avid are offering unprecedented discounts for FCP owners to purchase their editing products.
It's almost inconceivable to this writer (whose day job is as a professional video editor) how the lackluster judgment of the leadership of Apple could put into a professional marketplace a product so hobbled and simply foreign to legions of vocal, supportive and dedicated users to make it virtually unusable in a broadcast environment...and not have figured out what would happen. The question it raises is whether it truly was a mistake in judgment, or a cynical way for Apple to divest itself of a market it may really not have wanted (or needed) to support in the first place: the broadcast professional.
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