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To: BillHoo who wrote (24253)	4/22/1999 1:23:00 PM
From: Kelley Rickenbaker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 213177

Bill, I work in televison production and am around AVID systems daily. When I began following this thread concerning AVID's pending move to an NT platform structure -- abandoning Mac -- I asked a well- informed AVID engineer friend for his analysis. I am posting his reply to my questions below. It makes interesting reading. I am certain of his engineering expertise concerning AVID...however I can't verify his stock analysis. It sounds plausible, tho. (NAB, by the way, is the annual meeting of the National Association of Broadcasters..currently underway in Las Vegas.) Kelley R. --- As per our conversation earlier today, I've now heard from several sources that Avid announced, at NAB, its plans to continue development on Macintosh-based products through version 8.0, and support will continue as well. From this point on, however, Avid is currently planning to develop versions beyond Media Composer 8.0 for the Windows NT platform only. The reasons for this, I'm told, are: 1. Macintosh systems (the current G3s) only have 3 available PCI slots for additional processing cards; most high-end graphics systems require at least 3 additional cards, and AVID currently uses a minimum of 5. This has forced Avid to have to develop a PCI "bus extender" box, which links directly to the computer bus, making it possible to load all the cards necessary to run Media Composer. [The last 6-slot machine Macintosh developed was the 9600.] 2. AVID also tells me that their software developers cannot get Macintosh to share their CODECs ("code-decode" information necessary for proper programming) with Avid's development department. This makes it exceedingly difficult to develop new software for the Mac OS, as current codecs then need to be reverse-engineered, a costly and time consuming process, which could be all but eliminated if Mac would simply share that information with developers. Avid probably has other reasons which they can't talk about publicly, at least one of which may be pressure from part-owner Intel (a $9 million stock purchase last year, somewhere around 10 percent of Avid's stock as existed then). I'm sure Intel is not crazy about the fact that Avid has, to this point, been genuinely Mac-based, as this only helps it's competitor Motorola; still, with AMD and Cyrix's new processors now "blowing the doors off" of Intel'slatest releases, it may be just a matter of time anyway before Intel finds itself a commodity rather than a trusted brand name. Just the same, I'm sure this "co-operative relationship" with Intel is factoring in much more heavily than AVID would like to admit; Avid needs to maintain a public posture of "independence", even though I'm sure Intel has "convinced" Microsoft to share its CODEC information with Avid, something Microsoft has, in the past, ALSO been notoriously bad about. Politics aside, if Macintosh would, decidedly AND publicly, announce its cooperation with Avid's software design team, I'm sure much of this would blow over. My best guess, however, is that Mac is probably afraid that someone within AVID would share this proprietary information with Intel, or it would just plainly be stolen. If it doesn't share this CODEC information, the downside for Macintosh is that it will begin to lose its credibility as a company dedicated to high-end work stations for graphics and media professionals, something it has (until very recently) always relied upon. This is a small but very dedicated marketshare, and if the truth be known, I'm willing to bet that the G3 Macintosh benchmarks higher than all but the most expensive PCs. (My personal experience is that for speed, it's actually somewhere in the neighborhood of Silicon Graphics' new NT-based hardware system, which weighs in at around $10,000.) I'm not sure Mac is ready to "abandon" the high-end market share, but that appears to be what they're quietly attempting. So, that's what I think. Whether or not public opinion can get these giants talking with each other and cooperating is another story.