Apple steps on rake in FCP X strategy blunder
For a company that knows more about cultivating fanatical advocates than perhaps any other, Apple has really come a cropper this week. Their really clever software engineers have been busy with a ground-up re-write of one of their 'halo brand' products - Final Cut Pro. Final Cut has a huge following of semi-pro and professional video editors. It was among the leaders in bringing broadcast quality video editing to the desktop - and away from high end Silicon Graphics workstations running software that cost tens - or hundreds - of thousands of dollars. Apple could conceivably have continued developing Final Cut Pro incrementally, but there were big gains in speed and usability to be gained by re-writing the software as a 64 bit application. Ability to access more RAM and handle many processing tasks in the background (allowing the user to keep editing while the application was rendering, for example) were key drivers in the decision. With a more or less blank sheet of ...