Thursday, January 19, 2012

Apple Will Dictate the Direction of the Video Market

News today says APPLE's value will soon exceed 500 billion in market capitalization. They are the most valuable company in all of the world* Twice as big as Walmart. Bigger than Exxon. Twice as big as Microsoft. Apple's Final Cut competitor Premier is made by the Adobe company who has a current market value of 15 billion. Media Composer video editor is the current "top of the line" (as in most expensive by far) made by the Avid company, who has approximately a 1/3 of a billion market value. Just to put that in perspective, Apple is 1500 times bigger than Avid. Apple has the ability to move markets, and they are. Things are shifting. I don't know, but I am thinking that a company with 1,500 times more market value than its main competitor Avid, has the power to shift trends and methods a little. While Apple's stuff is surging in popularity, more professionals are beginning to start using their newer products, such as FCPX. They are giving it a shot. Who could not think that what Apple lays out for all to use is not the direction things will go? It absolutely is. The growth trends bear that out, the past decade bears that out, and there is no sign of is slowing down. But all the other guys ARE slowing down. Whether it makes sense or not, its all going to go this direction just like we got Windows when Microsoft controlled/dominated the market and copied a lot of Apple things, the market will now go the way that Apple takes it because they are in the drivers seat now. They are twice the size of Microsoft and have a constant upward growth rate. Relevance of the pc diminishes and the iOS increases with every iPAD and smart phone sold. Professionals of all industries will be shifting the way they do work, because as the demand for ordinary computers goes down and costs go up, economics will dictate how people do work in the future. An appliance that is your book, your camera, your internet, your interface to just about everything, all rolled into one, well... Bill Gates original "vision" of a pc in every home is being supplanted by a computing device in every HAND.

When I see professional musicians hooking all kinds of music instruments up to the "toy" iPAD at the NAMM shows, and I was there, they do and a it does look very strange, even dumbed down a bit, but what's wrong with a lower price point anyway? We see how software running on those things is gaining in popularity because it is so dang convenient and the big one time cost is the iPAD, there is no way that I can't think its also going to happen to the mainstream of video processing. FCPX will be looking pretty good on one of those, if that's the way its done in the future, because it lends itself to that drag and drop stuff. FCPX is to the video world what the DAW was to the music world, a game changer. FCPX will cause a lot more people in the world to learn how to edit video, and the skill set will significantly increase, just like it did in the studio world of music, the DAW world. And, just like they came out initially with small laptop screens, but they came out with larger screens in time, surely, there will be a large iPAD touch screen offering in the future for those of us who really like real estate space on a “desktop.” If SUPPORT for traditional workflows in video editing wanes, surely there will be more professionals using the firewire and prosumer tools because they just "work" with apple products. I can see that... Heck, the iPAD is a “prosumer” tool.

* http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottdecarlo/2011/08/11/the-worlds-25-most-valuable-companies-apple-is-now-on-top/

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