I've been using Avid, both as an editor, engineer and now as a facilities manager for over ten years. In that time I've learned to love the product, and usually be ambivalent toward the company.
For years Avid have produced the best NLE, with its simple clean interface it is quick to learn and easy to support. Yes they always ripped us off on storage and it has always been an in joke, even amongst Avid themselves that they fleeced us. I once heard anecdotally that pre 2000 the way that Avid UK drew up their price book was to take the price in dollars add 20% and move that figure directly in to pounds! I have no idea if that is true but certainly that until recently it has always been much cheaper to buy in the US than Europe.
Up until 2000 we could forgive Avid, it was all we had. Then comes along FCP, the young Turk, cheap as chips straight out of the box, no support what you see is what you get. Love it or hate it, I don't care. The argument of which is better is boring and its horses for courses, but it sent Avid into a spin, prices have been dropping ever since.
Last year Avid lost tens of millions; in the last QUARTER they posted a $31 million loss. They conducted a customer survey of what their clients thought of the company...Sources tell us they only managed a 20% approval rating, the lowest rating the polling company had ever seen.
In an effort stem the tide of decreased market share (I bet they deny this) in what is an increasing market, with internet video, they have implemented measures. Or as they loved to tell you last year... "We are listening".
So far this has meant staff cuts, not a bad thing to regularly clear out the dead wood, better to not let the wood go bad though। I personally found often Avid had some very good, nice people, though I would not call them dynamic। The corporate culture has never been very "can do".
They've sold of Pinnacle, for a massive loss, always baffled me why they bought it in the first place।
They have "rebranded" Digidesign, into Avid. Ok I can see that.
We have a new CEO with Gary Greenfield, the jury is out. Steve Jobs he ain't.
Recently they flew much of the staff out to LA to get everyone on message. I'm told this was death by power point, and I'm told that Avid seemed to see the future threat coming from Adobe rather than FCP (now that I did find surprising)
All of these things may or may not bring the company back into profitability, but what they don't seem to talk about ever is how they are going to improve on the product. Go to youtube and find the corporate video of the version 1 or 2 Media Composers, it looks the same as it does today. In ten years I'm not sure Avid have made any great changes to the product from an editing point of view, yes it imports various file format, yes its now .mxf and .omf but thats all yawn stuff. From and editing point of view of putitng pictures together, very little has changed, the feature set is principally the same.
Everyone at Avid is obsessed with the 're-structuring'...oooh big changes at Avid...well we the users dont care..we dont care if you are juggling around back office staff & selling off bits of the company you should never have bought...we care about the product...the software..what it can do for us...this is what we want to hear about...
I don't want to see Avid go under, I would guess if they carried on as they are Avid are on course for going the same way as lightworks or media 100. So Avid, Gary and who else over there, have a read and think about it... I don't envy your task.
