The Opening Bell (no one told me I had to make a speech)

Agreed. And if you write down in your diary/notebook what have you when you recognize you're happy and having fun. Then write down as much of what you can capture about why. That will give you a tool to use to figure out where to go next to maximize your engagement level with your next task.

The Sonic Foundry software was uniformly excellent. It’s perhaps a cautionary tale as to how much market structure is as much, if not more, of a factor in ultimate business success.

My perception was that the principles determined that the market they were in, the audio/media authoring tools space, would not support a business of the scale that they aspired to, or perhaps that their investors expected.

They managed to position themselves as being a “dot com” company (not implausibly) and the stock price shot up 20x.

Efforts to build a business with potential to grow into the now sky high valuation centered around a strategy of media encoding. (Moving Media Online was the rather on point slogan.) Ultimately this proved not to be a viable business, but resources were diverted from the existing media tools product lines. This prevented the media software from capitalizing on some of the profound advantages it offered over competing products, and from staying competitive in the small and fiercely fought audio production space.

Similarly, though Vegas was excellent, and forward looking, video editing software, it never received the sustained investment required to break into the realms of the market leaders.

Eventually the company brought back some attention to the media tools product line, but the financial realities and missed opportunities to keep the software competitive forced the sale of those assets to Sony.

I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform. I’m an audio engineer, so I’m not as familiar with the needs of the market, but Vegas actually struck me as being far ahead of other native video editing software. It was also very easy to learn and use.

I worked with Sonic Foundry as a sound designer, so my perspective is from the periphery. I’m sure the insiders would have a far more detailed description of the various branching strands of stories.

It’s nice to read Monte’s recollections of a fascinating time.

Acid never struck me as something particularly widely used. I was big into electronic music production at the time and I started with Acid + Sound Forge but eventually moved on to Reason and later Ableton + Reason. People who were doing a lot of multitrack editing seemed pretty loyal to Cubase (or Pro Tools if they were using Macs) and then Ableton came along and became extremely popular.

Sound Forge is of course in a class of its own.

+1 their products and UX were top notch.

There is surprisingly little difference between what one software developer can accomplish and what a hundred can accomplish.