Will Apple Snatch Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?

Since the return of Steve Jobs to Apple they’ve just gone from strength to strength with a few missteps along the way.

iMac
iPod
iPhone
iPad
iTunes
MacBook
MacBook Pro
MacBook Air
Apple Stores
the upcoming iCloud that we hope launches better than MobileMe
the App Store

That’s a lot of winners.

Now Apple is making inroads into the corporate market, the potential to become a massively dominant player is within their grasp.

Will they ‘screw the pooch’? Sad to say that a very possible scenario.

If you look at the recent launch of Final Cut Pro X you’d have to say that was pretty comprehensively screwed up. Apple managed to piss off a vast majority of editors with that one. I know they’re saying just wait for the updates and all will be good, but people don’t want to wait for the updates. They want it to be good when they get it.

That’s kind of like buying a Porsche and discovering that the wheels are on a boat from Outer Mongolia so you’ll just have to wait until they arrive and THEN everything will be really good. Promise.

The truth of the matter is that Apple do not, and appear to never have, understood the corporate market. Sure they understand it better than the Gnomes of Mountain View, but they don’t get it like Microsoft do.

I talked about this some time back in this old blog entry at Anthill. Apple just don’t seem to get corporate customers, but, there is a chance that this may change with the Commonwealth Bank deploying 4000 MacBook Air laptops to replace their fleet of Dell laptops.

If they don’t screw things up at the Commonwealth and they can learn about what corporates want, they might, just might, figure out how to crack this market sector.

That being said if anyone can screw up a deal like this its Apple.

Final Cut Pro X - Apple Screws the Pooch

Normally I wouldn't talk about video editing software here but I think the problems Apple is having with Final Cut Pro X is interesting to talk about.

When Apple announced that they would be upgrading Final Cut Pro to a 64-bit application and rewriting it from 'the ground up' the collective cheers from the FCP user community rang out around the world.

Then the product showed up at its first public demo and it appeared to be heading for a hard landing. Then it showed up and it cratered.

You know when Conan O'Brien is making fun of a piece of software that it can't be a good thing.

If this is anything to go by then the big winners may be Avid and Adobe.

Not wanting to miss out on a chance to stick it to Apple, Adobe have announced a programme for people who want to switch from any version of Final Cut Pro to their product.

The lesson here is that revolutionary change is good but rapid evolutionary change is better.

Apple got rid of Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro and merged them into one product at a reasonable price, which, in itself is a great idea, but then they went and made it look like iMovie. The one thing I've learnt in many years in the tech industry is that 'experts' don't like advanced tech being made accessible.

I also think that not allowing users to import projects done in previous versions of FCE or FCP was a colossal mistake...you can just see the conversation:

"I'm sorry Mr. Spielberg I won't be able to re-edit the Final Extreme Blu Ray Directors Cut of 1941 for your already scheduled release date because I upgraded to Final Cut Pro X and it won't let me work on everything I've done to date. Oh and by the way Apple also didn't release a DVD/Blu Ray authoring package so after I've redone everything then I'll have to put together the menus for the disc on iDVD so could you have a look on your home computer and tell me which theme you think would work well for the disc."

I'm thinking this won't go over too well.

This smells like another MobileMe debacle so when is Steve Jobs going to step in and get this one fixed? Or have Apple decided that they want to get out of the high end non-linear video editing business?