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Technology Stocks : Avid Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: BMcV who wrote (700)	4/23/1999 8:30:00 AM
From: soup	Respond to of 777

Avid vs. AAPL [Note: These were posted on the SI/AAPL. Seems silly not to cc them here for comments.] >My take is that, with Final Cut/QT Server/QT PLayer, AAPL's positioning itself to dominate whole media content creation/dissemination ball of wax. This parting of ways did not come out of the blue. Both saw this long time coming. Avid prepped itself by getting in bed with INTC/MSFT. AAPL went out and bought Final Draft from Macromedia. I think AAPL's better off. Avid sells its hardware for $2-20K. AAPL sold 95/9600s for made $3-4K. Who's paying for what for what and who's reaping the rewards? Better to sell 50,000 copies of Final Draft at $1K then not recoup development costs on what they would get selling 50,000 six-slot G4s. Jobs and company my be a bunch of arrogant pricks but at least they can count! This is absolutely not my area of expertise but, as I understand, rather than relying on the CPU's processor, Avid was using additional hardware to facilitate the editing process. By presenting a software-only solution, AAPL is betting that G4/Altivec will take up the slack for enough of the video editing market. That and bundling it with QT Player/Server, should make a lot of people an offer they cannot refuse. soup< exchange2000.com Also some SI/AAPL comments: >You're spot on. The power necessary to edit broadcast video is fixed and as the CPU starts surpassing that additional hardware is irrelevant, especially with all of the midrange stuff going to FireWire anyway. Avid will have to be a software company. It seems to me, though, that Jobs has made surprisingly good and mature decisions the last year or two-- He's learned a lot at NeXT (rmember, next was profitable as soon as they switched to software only) and rather than being arrogant and killing MacOS he has taken a prudent and very profitable path to getting Apple into the 90s OS wise. Dragonfly< exchange2000.com >I want to stress to everyone that Final Cut is NOT a replacement for an Avid workstation. The fact that Final Cut is software-rendered and not real-time negates any possibility of that (among other things). Avid is high-end professional. Final Cut is low-end professional to high-end hobbyist. The loss of Avid is not much of a negative when it comes to actual CPU sales. Someone mentioned that there are maybe 50,000 Media Composer workstations out there. Big deal. The defection does do some damage to Apple's reputation, however. Will Avid start a domino-effect, with Media 100, et al. also defecting? Personally, I doubt that will happen. Media 100 just approved the Blue G3's for use with their product, and an article from MacCentral had some quote about Apple being very helpful toward Media 100 to work out the bugs between the Media 100 hardware and the Blue G3. Plus, other companies should see Avid's abandonment of the Mac as a market opportunity to exploit. Andrew< exchange2000.com >Soup, very interesting take on all the Avid stuff. Yes, growing the video market and having a big chunk of software sales is better than having Avid continue a Mac version, most likely. I go back to Apple's contention that only 1% of users needed six slots. That was only 25,000 boxes a year--not all that important to Apple's future success, IMO. Although yes, it's a bad precedent and we don't really want to lose the Doren's of the world. Hmmm. Marc< exchange2000.com