g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Tuesday, January 3, 2006
16:50 - Déjà Vu
http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/1/2/2286

(top) link
John Siracusa—no Pollyanna on Apple at any point in its corporate trajectory—is bullish on Aperture. Here's his thesis:

I'd be a lot more pessimistic about Aperture's prospects if we hadn't just seen the very same scenario play out over the past few years with Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro was introduced into an even more competitive market than Aperture's, and had arguably more significant technical flaws in its early releases. (Most notably, it was saddled with a DV/NTSC codec that had serious artifacting issues—issues that remained until after Final Cut Pro version 1.2). Despite the promise of its elegant UI and the unrealized potential of the underlying technology, Final Cut Pro was a deeply flawed product out of the gate. Even professionals who wanted to like it found that they couldn't use it for serious work until some of the big issues were resolved. Starting to sound familiar?

. . .

I find the Final Cut Pro connection so blindingly obvious, and so important, that I'm surprised it hasn't dominated all discussion of Aperture. Aperture is Final Cut Pro all over again, only with an even better start this time. Aside from a few technical innovations, Final Cut Pro was essentially a "me too" product in a field crowded with well-established applications that did the same thing. Aperture, on the other hand, has no direct peers. Several aspects of Aperture compete with one or more specialized applications, but there is no other "one-stop shop" for professional RAW image organization, editing, and publishing.

. . .

It will take longer for competitors to match the feature set and overall design of Aperture than it will for Aperture to fix enough bugs and performance issues to finally become usable.

I'm not enough of a video geek to know anything about FCP's history, but I'll bet I know people who can confirm this take on things. And since I do know a little bit more about photography these days than I ever did about video, Aperture is likely to be of a bit more concrete interest to me, as I'm sure it will be to a lot of people like me who like casual photography enough to spend money on its attendant techno-gadgets but who aren't inclined to go the extra step into full-featured video production. They're different disciplines, to be sure, but the barrier to entry for the one is a lot lower than for the other. (And Aperture's and FCP's prices are commensurately proportional, I'd say.)

This is an interesting take on things, though: if true, it means Apple has been learning a great deal from Microsoft. Namely, they've learned how to dominate a software market: get something out early, even if it's buggy, and control the environment in which it runs, giving users the assurance that there will be dividends for loyalty when the revolution comes. Who remembers the horror that was Internet Explorer 1.0? Or even 2.0 or 3.0? Yet because it was always lurking on the edge of every Windows user's sight, by the time IE 4.0 came out, Microsoft had to do almost no pushing to get people to fall into its camp. Besides, when you've already been using some software solution that's inadequate and putting up with its shortcomings, there isn't much that's more satisfying—or more likely to cement your loyalty to the software—than having the inadequacies fixed in a painless revision and finding you can suddenly do more, and more easily.

Apple's apparently figured out how to do this—with the iLife apps, certainly, and with the Pro apps as well. Apparently even the professionals who think nothing of dropping $1000 on a software application are willing to accept serious shortcomings in it as long as they're sure they can trust that they'll eventually be fixed. For a pro, it's not about picking up a new tool and changing your workflow and habits every time a glowing review comes out; it's about establishing a workflow for the future, staking out an expertise in a particular application and learning how it says it works, so—as long as you can cope with the flaws in the meantime—it will pay off in the long run in simply doing everything you need in one well-marked place.

Apple has only been in the application business for about five years now. Before that, they adhered to the policy of releasing no software before its time; they had to be, because on the odd occasions when they put deadlines ahead of fixing bugs—e.g. System 7.5.1—they got their ass handed to them. And rightly so: the Mac OS was old by then and shouldn't have had any excuse to be as buggy as that release was. It had no future promise to look forward to; what it could offer was stability, and it failed abjectly on that count, leaving people with little hope except in switching to Windows. But those who stuck with it and saw the release of Mac OS X, as unfinished as it was in its .0 state, were wholly on board the moment they saw what the future could hold for an OS that had been completely rebuilt from the ground up with the infrastructure in place for advances undreamed-of at the time. Gradually, since then, those advances and more have been delivered. And yet there's been more and more infrastructure added as well, namely Core Image, Core Video, and so on, which provide a substrate for apps like Aperture.

Maybe Aperture 1.x sucks; maybe it will for the foreseeable future. But Mac OS X sucked too for at least two more major versions; its shortcomings overshadowed its objective merits. But they didn't overshadow its promise, and the people who bet the farm on it are generally pretty glad they did.

UPDATE: Of course, when it comes to hard-core data-center stuff, people won't buy unless they're convinced you've got your story straight. Looks like the South Park guys think Apple's made it:

Franzen said he chose Apple hardware based on a “gut” feeling that its technology would be good, and so far, he has not been disappointed. Franzen said he now expects to add two more Xserve arrays for a total of 15TB of storage and place his disk storage behind a couple of switches from Cisco Systems Inc. in order to make managing his storage easier.

A gut feeling makes him switch from Legato to an Xserve-based SAN? Maybe he didn't take that much convincing after all. Good thing it worked for him!

Via evariste.


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© Brian Tiemann