Thanks for your trolling comment.

I would like to see the new FCPRO (Cocoa) supporting:

64 bit – – OpenCL , and GPU support for ATI HD 5xx…6xxx cards.

If not , I dont see any future for this app.

Keep up the good work.

And if you think FCP team has any better access to the OS X engineers that Adobe then you don’t know Apple’s internal workings that well.

Philip

Hard? They only need to do a Mac version and they have access to OS X engineers… In that time Premiere and others, like this little app, Adobe Photoshop went cross platform OS 9 to OS X to Intel and now to Cocoa and 64bit. Apple is now proven to be the "lazy" company

Having said that, one of the most important considerations is price point. Apple Marketing makes no haphazard calls where price is concerned. If you want to know whether or not Apple is looking to push their product into a more broad demographic you need look no further than price.

It used to be that you could always tell when a product was headed for “End of Life”, just watch the price drop a few cycles. I would say thats not true anymore per-se but price is still a VERY IMPORTANT indicator that something is a up and in this case they want more people then just working pro’s to be able to buy into the software.

Its been clear that Steve is vastly more concerned with the consumer space than any other space Apple is involved in. Thats been very clear for sometime now. What that means for the future of Apple’s enterprise organization is unclear still. As long as the pro space has some value to Apple, they will stay engaged in it but not one minute longer.

If you want to know where Steve’s head is at take note.
This comment by Steve just yesterday at the D8 conference:

7:06 p.m. PDT: Is tablet eventually going to replace laptop, Walt asks.

7:07 p.m. PDT: Jobs: “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that’s what you needed on the farms.” Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular.

7:07 p.m. PDT: “PCs are going to be like trucks”

7:07 p.m. PDT: “They are still going to be around…they are going to be one out of x people.”

……What do you read into “PC?” I have not doubt its no just a comment about the competing computer platform.

Philip

The articles here are always proofed by my partner, who also speaks and writes Australian.

Right usage, wrong country

Cheers

Philip

In the late 1990’s Macromedia were going head-on against Adobe

had no need for Final Cut and where in fact shopping it around

Apple have poured a lot of money into the Pro Apps

Apple are pushing all their applications to 64bit and to Cocoa

Avid have been very strong with their

Adobe have just released a version of Premiere Pro

I are amazed! This are why English are mandatory for schools… Anyone brains hurting yet???? Geeezzz!!!!!!!!

(Seriously… great article, but a little more time spent proofing would have been a good idea. Or maybe the author got it right and I got it wrong?)

Well, I respectfully disagree. First of all, there is the question of how much truth he was willing to tell and then there is the question of what he actually meant (what is highly profitable, whether their profit is internally “inflated” via “licensing” deals with the consumer application division, etc.).

And most of all, the pro division simply does not behave like a highly profitable unit. They have high profile products which have had frozen development for years and years, they killed a major high-end product with no replacement, they lag badly in porting their core application to the newest Apple technologies and in unifying the UI of newer aquisitions, the feature updates were more than modest last time around and they even fired quite a few people.

Now, of course, this all could simply be a false image – perhaps they are lagging because Apple’s top management temporarly shuffled programmers to other projects (one has to wonder why they would do such a disruptive thing to a division which is highly profitable), maybe the strategic goals of Apple got in the way of the further development of certain tools (like DVD Studio Pro) and maybe they simply do work their asses off in creating a great FCS4 which will blow everybody’s minds, and this is just a multi-year project that is suffering some delays.

But the image they are projecting outside isn’t one that inspires much confidence – which is why such rumours get created and repeated and even believed by some. And I don’t think Jobs’ emails do much to eliminate this lack of trust/perspective – obviously the one thing that would help is a clear timeline and/or an product announcement.

“Adobe is a different company that earns most of it’s revenue from it’s Postscript and PDF products.”

I do not know where this particular myth has its origins (because I have seen it often repeated on the Intertubes), but that is not true, and in fact hasn’t been true for the last 15 years or so.

Adobe’s investor reports and financial data are freely available for everybody to look at, and it is very easy to see why the above statement is untrue.

The Creative Solutions segment has consistely realized between 55% and 60% of Adobe’s total revenue (58% in the last fiscal year). This segment includes all of the Creative Suite applications (plus their consumer versions) and does NOT include Acrobat, Acrobat Pro, etc.

Everything that has to do with Acrobat is in the so called Knowledge Worker segment, the business document management products are in the Enterprise segment and together form the Business Productivity solutions segment, Omniture products get their own segment, all the back-end Flash products are in the Platform segment, and everything that has to do with backend print/publishing solutions (like PostScript, Contribute, Captivate, etc.) are in the Print & Publishing segment.

By percentage of revenue (in the last FY) they split like this:

Creative : 58%
Business Productivity: 29%
Omniture: 01%
Platform: 06%
Print & Publishing: 06%

So, one can clearly see that the majority of Adobe’s revenue comes from their content creation solutions, and PDF/PostScript realize only a minority.

So, from this perspective, it is perfectly possible to compare Adobe with Apple’s pro division, because they are quite similar in terms of products they sell and in terms of the expenses they incur.

It is certainly true that out of the Creative solutions, the actual video products are only a part, and unfortunately it is nigh impossible to figure out how much of the revenue they aquire, let alone how much actual profit. However – for the purposes of our comparison – this is not relevant, since applications like Photoshop or Illustrator are comparable in complexity with video applications, and the equation of costs, revenue and profit is equally applicable.

“Also, while $40 million is insignificant in net revenue (profit) to Apple, the division, making 40 million on 150 million would have to be considered “highly profitable” by any margin. I’d love that profit margin and that amount of profit.”

One has to note that the 24% number is operating margin, not actual net profit. The net profit margin of Adobe is just 12%.

It is certainly not bad for a company in general, altough it is far from spectacular in a software company. However, the real issue is that it is not even as profitable compared Apple as a whole: AAPL has an operating margin of 30% and a net profit margin of more than 21%, significantly higher than Adobe.

Which means that even if the pro division of Apple manages the same profits as Adobe (despite the fact that they are selling their products at pretty much half the price), they still are not as profitable as other divisions from Apple, not in total profits, and not in percentages. They would be, metaphorically speaking, “dragging down” the company, as much as one can drag down a company while making money for it.

If net profit would be the main interest of the pro division for Apple, then one could certainly imagine a bean counter somewhere that would decide that the money invested in the pro division might produce a better return on investment somewhere else inside of Apple, where the higher profit margins are realized (say iPhone operations, or whatever).

Which is why I am thinking that actual profitability is not that important for the pro division (in fact, it is perfectly possible that the division is only marginally profitable, if at all), and the main interest for Apple is all the other things we mentioned.

You are right: they just said that it would continue to be the tool of choice for professionals. When it’s released we’ll all decide.

But nothing has changed today; nothing will have changed tomorrow, next week or next month. Or any time before they decide to release the next version. If Final Cut Pro isn’t working for you Adobe have fine tuned Apple’s hardware for some amazing performance in Premiere Pro CS 5; Avid are definitely back in the game with two very strong releases, reasonably priced monitor options and much more aggressive pricing.

Nobody makes anyone buy Apple products. If FCP stops being your tool of preference then you’ll have sent the message that Apple’s Pro Apps team got it wrong. But I’d at least like to see what comes out of it before pre-judinging.

And, from what I do know about how the team works (after 11 years of “outside” observance), I doubt there are many people who have any idea what the final version of Final Cut Pro (next) (Final Cut KickAss, Final Cut Awesome?) will and will not have in terms of features. I do know that FCP editors were clamoring for features from iMove 09 when they saw it demonstrated.

I just don’t believe in rumors.

Philip

I agree with the comment that Apple went out of their way to drive NLEs off the platform by taking away slots and serial ports. It pushed the NT rush. Media 100 begged them not to kill the 5 slots. Remember?

More to the point, Steve was not happy about Microsoft’s 20% stake in Avid via their stock swap for Softimage (another development project for us that didn’t see the light of day due to bad timing). When that happened, Avid literally went around their place replacing Macs with PCs on desks.

And Apple’s dark times? Only started looking better with the $150M loan from MS birthed those crazy colored first iMacs. Clearly it was not FCP that turned the company around.

Personally I think the birth of FCP was a lark fueled by Steve’s hobby at Pixar. They could have continued to sell just as many (high end) Macs by continuing to manufacture 5 slot machines that Avid and Media100 needed.

Last, keep in mind Mr Jobs isn’t always 100% honest when feeding the media (The Next Big Thing should be a required read for anyone thinking of tying their career to a single computer manufacturer).

Oh, and my “insider” info said at the time Apple bought FCP that it was intended as a “Media100 killer”–nothing about “hey, we just want to make sure there continues to be a NLE on a Mac”.

Truly, Apple will do what Apple will do (like inexplicably walking away from the print and education markets in the early 90s).

“You may have been too deep in the forest so you see only the local trees rather than the whole forest?”

Well, I was certainly “in the forest.” You? Nowhere near it.

“Besides, see my last comment: Apple officially denies that they are taking features out. Specifically.”

“Specifically…” Really? Maybe I’m missing something, but I looked at the links in your comment and I still don’t see official Apple denials of the specific allegation that features have been/will be taken out of the next-generation FCP. All I can find are vague, laconic quotes from Steve Jobs that are not specific at all: “Don’t believe everything you read” and “The next release will be kickass” hardly address that specific claim.

Another useful rule of thumb: Don’t believe everything self-interested CEO’s say, especially when they haven’t actually said what you think they said.