Courtesy of CreativeCow forum:
"When I worked at Avid, David Krall, the CEO, insisted that the first thing he wanted to hear out of your mouth during a presentation was the conclusion. Last slide first, he said.
So here's the last slide first. Not one hip-hopper on the planet cares that you hate hip-hop. You're not the target audience. You being a hatah (ask your daughter if you can't figure it out) doesn't pull a dime out of their pockets. Ask Jay-Z if you can't figure THAT out.
The moral of the story is that Premiere isn't meant for people like you. Or me, but I like Premiere, and I like hip-hop, too. (Ghostface Killa is still at the top of his game, but I miss Busta Rhymes.)
The other moral of the story is that people outside Preemie's target audience use it anyway.
Read on.
1) The FIRST thing I said to Simon Hayhurst at Adobe when he told me the news was that I did NOT think this was good news. I thought it was BAD news, and I didn't like it. I said exactly what several of you said -- PPro takes such advantage of Windows-only architecture that there was no way it could work.
He pointed out that Adobe has been developing dual-platform apps for ten years, and they're pretty good at it. Point taken.
He also pointed out that the Intel thing cut a full year off Adobe's development time...and added that it wasn't until Mac OS 10.5 that Adobe started seeing the performance they wanted on Mac. STARTED. Which says to me that it's not all the way there (although Simon said no such thing).
He said I'd be pleased with the performance, and I'll wait and see. I'm especially concerned with OpenGL -- Mac display cards are dog slow. We'll ALL see, won't we?
2) Listen to the podcast. Simon explicitly calls out Discreet edit. He says that Discreet was positioned to make edit the standard editing platform, but decided they'd sacrifice that aim for a bigger slice of the top end of the market. Simon says that was a BAD call, both for us and for Discreet, and I have to agree. I suspect you might too.
Simon was at SGI at the time (10 yrs), and felt they made the same short-sighted call. As he quotes one of the bosses, "SGI always learns from its mistakes -- they're just the wrong lessons." Short version: SGI made a desktop display card in 1992 for $3500, and said, this is ridiculous -- nobody can make money selling desktop cards for so little money. Tell that to nVidia, says Simon.
3) I've had TWO jobs where my primary responsibility included hard verification of both sales and market share. In my position at Boris, I had some inside information, as I watched OEM sales rise and fall. Discreet went from number one to off the bottom of the chart in under two years. Sorry.
That wasn't the whole picture, though, since it focused on OEM sales. First Media 100, then Avid rose to the number 1 slot of Boris Red sales, even though Avid will never have CLOSE to the number one slot for NLE sales.
Except in Hollywood, where Avids are used on 100 times more features than FCP. (Very easy math in Hollywood -- just pick up the phone and ask. Not that many features being made at any one time, and people loooooove to talk about themselves.) But I think Avid has made the same mistake Discreet made. I think Avid thinks so too, even if they never call it a mistake. Look at the signs: they're working diligently to create a new business for themselves.
Where does Premiere fit into this? They rocketed up through the Boris database from zero to number two in under a year, with NO bundling! They were easily ready to pass Avid when I left. Even more remarkably, this was solely looking at sales of Boris Red, for $2K (at the time). I left out the cheap products.
These were hard numbers, verified with cold hard cash. Make no mistake, Premiere folks are making money, and there are a ton of them.
4) So when I got to Avid, I was actually in a position to get even harder numbers for a wider range of stuff. Why? Because there were a bunch of us at other companies doing the same job, and our lives were all easier when we gave each other the straight dope -- we were probably going to wind up working at the same company with each other some day anyway.
The other great source of info was resellers. They loved being sources of inside info TO us so they could get some inside info FROM us. Here's how THAT works: just before NAB, everybody has their reseller meetings, where we go over sales figures and lay out our strategies for the coming year. To pump your team up, you exaggerate your strengths and brush over your weaknesses.
And every year, by the end of lunch time, everybody has everybody else's sales kit. Most dealers carry most lines, and don't forget -- they want to be your source so that you'll tell them inside stuff in return.
No need for corporate espionage. Just wait for lunch.
So you write the sales kit KNOWING the other guys will have it in their hands by the end of lunch on the first day. And you read everybody else's sales kit knowing that they know the same thing.
5) You put together all your sources and you triangulate, with one final point of reference. You go on the road. Folks here who knew me from Boris know that I spent upwards of 200 days on the road every year, going to user groups. I was still travelling half that much at Avid.
What I saw on the road -- in hospitals, firehouses, schools, offices, PR companies, and more -- was a dominance of Premiere easily 3-to-1 over anyone else.
I spent a lot of time in event videography groups, an audience that Boris coveted, and that both Avid Xpress and Avid Liquid (both part of my responsibility) coveted too -- you might think them beneath you, and maybe they are -- but they have crazy money. The wedding guy in my neighborhood grosses around $300K/yr and takes home a little over $100K yr. He buys more editing gear more often that I ever did.
Among those groups, Premiere has EASILY 90% of the market, with everyone fighting for their slice after that. FCP was the rising star there, but Premiere is growing so much faster it's ridiculous.
This is a loooooooong story to tell you that I never met ANYONE ANYWHWERE in the industry who would dispute the following sentence:
Premiere. Has. More. Market. Share. Than. Everyone. Else. Combined.
Okay, sentence fragments. Here's the sentence: Premiere has more market share than everyone else combined.
Not prosumer, btw. Pinnacle Studio has that locked up so hard your head would spin. My teeth hurt just thinking about the numbers -- which, again, I had clear access to. When I talk about Premiere market share, I'm talking about PRO video editing. That is, people who earn money from video.
6) Here we are again at the last slide. I'm not surprised to hear that you don't like Premiere all that much. You're not the target audience all that much. Yet.
Two stories on that count. The first is in the article in the magazine -- Premiere is starting to gain acceptance in specific parts of the digital intermediate market for its flexible IO, and because it natively supports 4K image sequences with dandy performance. Oh yeah, and because of unmatched integration with Photoshop and After Effects. Read the rest of the story.
Here's the other story. I met the fella who's now the VP and General Manager of Adobe Dynamic Media when he was the VP in charge of the product group that included Flash at Macromedia. He collegially strolled up to the Avid booth at NAB, and with a pleasant smile said, "We're coming after you." Again, this suggests to me that he has no illustions that Premiere is there YET.
The cool thing about Adobe is that, like Microsoft, they have the resources to be patient. Nobody can name a single target that they've ever missed. Oh yeah, except for web and interactivity design, and they bought the guys with 80% (Dreamweaver)and 97% market share (Flash) in those categories...along with one of the industry's strongest server markets, web conferencing technologies, and more.
Bet against Premiere at your peril -- even though you might never like it, might not even ever see a copy being used by any of your clients. Adobe gets what Adobe wants. They want to keep winning.
Okay, I'm ready for a cocktail after that. See you kids in the hot tub on the Lido deck.
Tim "
"When I worked at Avid, David Krall, the CEO, insisted that the first thing he wanted to hear out of your mouth during a presentation was the conclusion. Last slide first, he said.
So here's the last slide first. Not one hip-hopper on the planet cares that you hate hip-hop. You're not the target audience. You being a hatah (ask your daughter if you can't figure it out) doesn't pull a dime out of their pockets. Ask Jay-Z if you can't figure THAT out.
The moral of the story is that Premiere isn't meant for people like you. Or me, but I like Premiere, and I like hip-hop, too. (Ghostface Killa is still at the top of his game, but I miss Busta Rhymes.)
The other moral of the story is that people outside Preemie's target audience use it anyway.
Read on.
1) The FIRST thing I said to Simon Hayhurst at Adobe when he told me the news was that I did NOT think this was good news. I thought it was BAD news, and I didn't like it. I said exactly what several of you said -- PPro takes such advantage of Windows-only architecture that there was no way it could work.
He pointed out that Adobe has been developing dual-platform apps for ten years, and they're pretty good at it. Point taken.
He also pointed out that the Intel thing cut a full year off Adobe's development time...and added that it wasn't until Mac OS 10.5 that Adobe started seeing the performance they wanted on Mac. STARTED. Which says to me that it's not all the way there (although Simon said no such thing).
He said I'd be pleased with the performance, and I'll wait and see. I'm especially concerned with OpenGL -- Mac display cards are dog slow. We'll ALL see, won't we?
2) Listen to the podcast. Simon explicitly calls out Discreet edit. He says that Discreet was positioned to make edit the standard editing platform, but decided they'd sacrifice that aim for a bigger slice of the top end of the market. Simon says that was a BAD call, both for us and for Discreet, and I have to agree. I suspect you might too.
Simon was at SGI at the time (10 yrs), and felt they made the same short-sighted call. As he quotes one of the bosses, "SGI always learns from its mistakes -- they're just the wrong lessons." Short version: SGI made a desktop display card in 1992 for $3500, and said, this is ridiculous -- nobody can make money selling desktop cards for so little money. Tell that to nVidia, says Simon.
3) I've had TWO jobs where my primary responsibility included hard verification of both sales and market share. In my position at Boris, I had some inside information, as I watched OEM sales rise and fall. Discreet went from number one to off the bottom of the chart in under two years. Sorry.
That wasn't the whole picture, though, since it focused on OEM sales. First Media 100, then Avid rose to the number 1 slot of Boris Red sales, even though Avid will never have CLOSE to the number one slot for NLE sales.
Except in Hollywood, where Avids are used on 100 times more features than FCP. (Very easy math in Hollywood -- just pick up the phone and ask. Not that many features being made at any one time, and people loooooove to talk about themselves.) But I think Avid has made the same mistake Discreet made. I think Avid thinks so too, even if they never call it a mistake. Look at the signs: they're working diligently to create a new business for themselves.
Where does Premiere fit into this? They rocketed up through the Boris database from zero to number two in under a year, with NO bundling! They were easily ready to pass Avid when I left. Even more remarkably, this was solely looking at sales of Boris Red, for $2K (at the time). I left out the cheap products.
These were hard numbers, verified with cold hard cash. Make no mistake, Premiere folks are making money, and there are a ton of them.
4) So when I got to Avid, I was actually in a position to get even harder numbers for a wider range of stuff. Why? Because there were a bunch of us at other companies doing the same job, and our lives were all easier when we gave each other the straight dope -- we were probably going to wind up working at the same company with each other some day anyway.
The other great source of info was resellers. They loved being sources of inside info TO us so they could get some inside info FROM us. Here's how THAT works: just before NAB, everybody has their reseller meetings, where we go over sales figures and lay out our strategies for the coming year. To pump your team up, you exaggerate your strengths and brush over your weaknesses.
And every year, by the end of lunch time, everybody has everybody else's sales kit. Most dealers carry most lines, and don't forget -- they want to be your source so that you'll tell them inside stuff in return.
No need for corporate espionage. Just wait for lunch.
So you write the sales kit KNOWING the other guys will have it in their hands by the end of lunch on the first day. And you read everybody else's sales kit knowing that they know the same thing.
5) You put together all your sources and you triangulate, with one final point of reference. You go on the road. Folks here who knew me from Boris know that I spent upwards of 200 days on the road every year, going to user groups. I was still travelling half that much at Avid.
What I saw on the road -- in hospitals, firehouses, schools, offices, PR companies, and more -- was a dominance of Premiere easily 3-to-1 over anyone else.
I spent a lot of time in event videography groups, an audience that Boris coveted, and that both Avid Xpress and Avid Liquid (both part of my responsibility) coveted too -- you might think them beneath you, and maybe they are -- but they have crazy money. The wedding guy in my neighborhood grosses around $300K/yr and takes home a little over $100K yr. He buys more editing gear more often that I ever did.
Among those groups, Premiere has EASILY 90% of the market, with everyone fighting for their slice after that. FCP was the rising star there, but Premiere is growing so much faster it's ridiculous.
This is a loooooooong story to tell you that I never met ANYONE ANYWHWERE in the industry who would dispute the following sentence:
Premiere. Has. More. Market. Share. Than. Everyone. Else. Combined.
Okay, sentence fragments. Here's the sentence: Premiere has more market share than everyone else combined.
Not prosumer, btw. Pinnacle Studio has that locked up so hard your head would spin. My teeth hurt just thinking about the numbers -- which, again, I had clear access to. When I talk about Premiere market share, I'm talking about PRO video editing. That is, people who earn money from video.
6) Here we are again at the last slide. I'm not surprised to hear that you don't like Premiere all that much. You're not the target audience all that much. Yet.
Two stories on that count. The first is in the article in the magazine -- Premiere is starting to gain acceptance in specific parts of the digital intermediate market for its flexible IO, and because it natively supports 4K image sequences with dandy performance. Oh yeah, and because of unmatched integration with Photoshop and After Effects. Read the rest of the story.
Here's the other story. I met the fella who's now the VP and General Manager of Adobe Dynamic Media when he was the VP in charge of the product group that included Flash at Macromedia. He collegially strolled up to the Avid booth at NAB, and with a pleasant smile said, "We're coming after you." Again, this suggests to me that he has no illustions that Premiere is there YET.
The cool thing about Adobe is that, like Microsoft, they have the resources to be patient. Nobody can name a single target that they've ever missed. Oh yeah, except for web and interactivity design, and they bought the guys with 80% (Dreamweaver)and 97% market share (Flash) in those categories...along with one of the industry's strongest server markets, web conferencing technologies, and more.
Bet against Premiere at your peril -- even though you might never like it, might not even ever see a copy being used by any of your clients. Adobe gets what Adobe wants. They want to keep winning.
Okay, I'm ready for a cocktail after that. See you kids in the hot tub on the Lido deck.
Tim "
