The three people Steve Jobs should fire | Hacker News Reader

The three people Steve Jobs should fire

scobleizer.com

11 pointsamesign14 comments

Dear people making great products,

Your products' minuscule flaws offend me, and render the entire product a failure. My complaints are more important than any decision or tradeoff you have made, and thus you are bad at your job.

- Some Whiner

I am sad this is on the frontpage of HN. Disrespectful and childish, regardless of whether it's barely attempting to be a joke or not.

I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value--certainly no large value...However, let it go. It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden.

- Mark Twain

Wow, this comes off as really immature. I honestly wondered if he was joking on #1, but it became clear that he didn't.

I agree that Airplay should work when minimized and that Final Cut Pro X are not ready for professional use yet, but those two relativiely minor issues (Airplay is a new feature, Final Cut Pro 7 still works) doesn't warrant an incredible angry post like this. He must have had a really bad day.

Any video editor who is already switching from Final Cut Pro 7 to Premiere should be fired. Obviously later versions (hopefully sooner rather than later) of Final Cut Pro X will have multi-camera support. FCP 7 is still as good as it was last week. FCP X is an impressively solid base for building out the advanced features that are currently missing; the interface is simply awesome.

I find it somewhat ironic that startup people are so upset at Apple for shipping an extremely refined minimum viable product. Apple does this all the time and startups do too. Because it's a proven method for successfully releasing radically innovative products.

On Airplay, it is so painfully obvious what this "limitation" is technical. Using Airplay, especially with HD video, probably sucks up a huge amount of CPU and bandwidth. That I can't multitask is a tradeoff, and one I'm willing to make if it means my video never skips.

MVP applies to the first iteration of a product, not version 8 of a mature codebase in heavy production use all over the world. It can't even load FCP 7 files.

It's not version 8 of a mature codebase, it's a complete rewrite. It's basically a completely new product with the same name.

Quite like OS X actually. The Mac OS series had a long and good run, but OS X was a completely new OS. It had a rocky start (like Final Cut Pro X has now), but eventually it will improve to the point where noone would even consider going back to 7/OS 9.

To be fair, FCPX is a complete rewrite of the entire codebase. It's a lot like Apple hit the reset button - a weird decision, but not unreasonable to call it an MVP...again.

It's not called Final Cut Pro 8, is it? It's exactly like the difference between Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X: enormous and transformative.

Apple bent over backwards to make the OS 9 - OS X transition as painless as possible. You could still run OS 9 apps under Rosetta for years after almost everybody stopped caring. Scoble's tone of entitlement is irritating but this release is more strong evidence that the pro market isn't important to Apple anymore.

And you can still run FCP7. What's the difference? There is none.

FCP 7 is still as good as it was last week

That's where I agree with you. For example, I'm still on 6 - because it works and there wasn't a need to upgrade it in our editing suite. However, I use AVID in parallel to FCP, and sometimes Premiere or Edius. It depends on the situation/editing facility/on set...

What FCPX currently did to me personally is that I'll just wait and see what happens. As it is right now, it's unusable to me (Film and Broadcast). Not in a sense that I'm spoiled so I need multicam or whatever (I never did use multicam - always put A and B roll on tracks, since I was used to it, not a big deal), it's that some of the essential tools are totally missing. First and foremost - no tape I/O which is a dealbreaker in broadcast. Tape is still the king and will be for a long time. Archives and deliverables are all on tape, even though playout is mostly all HDD based these days. Tape is going nowhere out, yet.

Second is EDL/XML. This is a big one for me. FCP/X, as I use it, is an offline editing program. I finish/online in other applications. When in a hurry, I used to do it in Color (which is now discontinued), but mostly it's either a smoke or scratch or some other tool (depending on situation). Since we can't easily communicate with FCPX now, it's out. I believe and hope this is their priority now to push in updates, soon. There are other issues too, like with AJA support or no OMF export (wtf, because how can I send audio for finishing then?) and others, but my opinion is that they should've just pushed more of the essential tools into the package before putting it out. Now, they have a short window where people will wait and see.

Then, there is their competition. Premiere pushed out some jaw dropping features recently for example. They have their mercury playback engine which lets you play 4K res in real time without special hardware (on an average workstation) for example, and my favorite is that it works natively with RED files. We have 8 RED cameras and this is a big feature for me. Since now, process I go through is (for FCP): Take a bunch of takes from camera (R3D RED files), convert them to offline ProRes files for editing (A SLOOOOOOOW process if you don't have $5k-$10k hardware addon just for that, and even then it's slow if you have a lot of takes), edit in FCP, color grade source material, convert once more, replace FCP source proxies with graded material via external utility application... You get it. With Premiere I can just open original take files (R3D) and start editing. Done.

And then, there is AVID. Media Composer is a golden standard. I actually prefer MC over FCP since I like to edit via keyboard in general, so that I don't lose time with switching my hand to mouse and back (which I need more in FCP than MC). Also, AVID is everywhere - FCP not so very much. You also have to realize one thing about broadcast and film in particular. It's that there are constant upgrade/equipment plans. Technology changes in this sector all the time and there are always projections of growth in general or for upcoming projects. So, you can have a 3 year plan being made right now for two or three projects which will be set in stone (for budget reasons). Hence the small window FCPX team has now. If they wait out too long, people will just use something else in their projections and that effect will cascade over the next few years. FCP7 is ok, not perfect, but ok. Thing is, you can't buy it anymore - support is also questionable, and this world lives from project to project. We like to play it safe, since mistakes cost a lot of money. I hope Apple will dig themselves out of this (either via updates soon or bringing back FCP7) or AVID and Adobe will have a field day.

As an example, I'm locked in a project until October. I'm in FCP6 until then, you can't change mid-project, it would be stupid. After that I have two projects lined up that span over the next two and a half years and budget/equipment list is being done over the next two months. That's my personal window where I'll wait and see what FCPX brings on. And, that's my own - every single Film/Broadcast production has their own... that's what I'm talking about, effects of their decisions will not be seen immediately.

That’s hyperbole, right? He doesn’t really believe that firing people is some sort of miracle cure, does he? He knows that firing people for a single mistake can be a very stupid idea, right?

I'm half-tempted to post this to Reddit. I hear they have a subreddit, "firstworldproblems", that seems to pretty much cover this article.

You can also try http://www.whitewhine.com. One spun from the other, I think.

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