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Comment by glhaynes | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that they don't really want to be in the pro apps business. Their pro apps were built or acquired for platform-strategic reasons during a time that the company's future was a fraction as stable as it is now and they don't really fit with the focus of the company.

But it'd be tough on a number of levels to outright cancel such a successful product as Final Cut Pro. And it's beneficial for them to have a stable of very capable media app developers that help drive design of and exercise system frameworks like AVFoundation and GCD and provide code/expertise that trickles down into media apps that are more aligned with the company's focus and main customers.

And I think they do think there's more profit to be made from a much larger audience of prosumer/pro-but-non-top-10-blockbuster-movie-editors. Bet they're right, too.

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I'd say it's not that they don't want to be in the pro apps business per se, so much as they don't want to be a software contractor for big studios, which is what most pro app companies inevitably become. Apple wanted to make big changes, but mostly, big studios / production houses don't want big changes.

Avid probably couldn't make a radically different Media Composer even if they wanted. The risk of alienating current customers is too great, and the resources required to maintain multiple products targeted to the same market are too many.

Wow. Makes so much sense I simply have to comment on it to "bump it up" so others can see it.

Reminds me of what Apple did to the smartphone market. While everyone was busy chasing the enterprise market, Apple built a smartphone for the consumer market. Enterprise customers are consumers too and they brought their "consumer" phone to work. Yada yada... Apple disrupts the enterprise smartphone market.

You don't get the "prosumer/pro-but-non-top-10-blockbuster-movie-editors" without being in the pro apps business. Moreover their pro apps fit the focus of the company, a high end creative company. It's hard to market pro apps to aspiring professionals and prosumers if pros are not using it. Part of Apple's marketing campaign for their pro apps is to show how pros are using their software.

Apple is no longer a "high end creative company". Their business now is making pretty, easy-to-use devices for non-techie consumers. They just happen to still have this vestigial organ hanging off the side.

I don't quite understand why they don't spin their pro apps off into their own company.

Exactly! If they had done this before killing off Shake, I bet we'd still have a half decent competitor to Nuke in the high end compositing space, instead of nothing.

Instead, Apple killed Shake and let big studios buy the source code from them so they could continue to use it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shake_(software)#History

Apple used the Shake team to build Motion, an application which a much larger user base.

pretty much everyone is on After Effects these days instead

What? Shake was THE node based compositing app!

There is a massive difference to Motion and the highend compositing apps like Shake, Nuke, Fusion, Softimage(Illusion+Matador=FXTree), Houdini(COPS), Flame, Toxik(Autodesk Composite). After Effects and Combustion are time-line based like Motion, but Motion doesn't begin to compare to them. Even Blender has fantastic compositing tools.

Shake was serious business. It's last well known big project was 'The Dark Knight' which Framestore CFC mangled a 64bit wrapper around it to better manage the 8k-frame workload. Shake was ported to Intel, then killed off, with no intention to take it to 64bit. I don't think you can buy the source code anymore.

The Foundry is absolutely kicking everyone else's ass with Nuke. They have an interesting business model as well: don't do much research in house, instead work with studios with big R&D budgets and license their tools when they're mature, bringing it to a wider audience.

They've done it with Digital Domain and Nuke (compositing), Weta and Mari (3d paint), and now Sony and Katana (lighting).

Shake was the king. But now the industries have Nuke. The king is dead long live the king!

Apple isn't so terribly different from other companies its size, it still has empire-itis. There is a fundamental inability of leadership to spin-off parts, to reduce the size of the empire.

You mean something like Claris? Because that didn't quite work out (although it's still alive).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claris

Quite so. "Prosumers" typically over-buy, they buy equipment with capabilities beyond what they would ever need. Often they buy the same equipment as professionals. If the professionals are using something else, prosumers are likely to follow.

Also, isn't this just a straight up example of disrupting an industry? When the PC came along, it wasn't as capable as the minicomputer, but it let you have a lot more control over your own environment, and it was a lot cheaper. Or what about desktop publishing versus old page layout solutions. Not as capable, but way cheaper and way easier to use, it ended up completely wiping out the old typesetting systems.

I see FCPX in a similar light. It may not be as capable as the other video editors out there in terms of format support / workflow support (and I include FCP7 in the list of competitors), but what it does do, it does really well. FCPX is blazingly fast compared to the other video editors out there, and that is a killer feature. Over time we can expect Apple to provide better workflow support - they've already indicated that they are adding xml support and a few other things that will go towards addressing many criticisms of workflow changes. Format support, and in particular tape support, may get left behind, but in this brave new world, tape is less and less relevant.

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