Macrumors has this interesting interview with Ron Brinkman, Shake’s product designer. Shake was the industry standard compositing program that Apple killed after 2 updates for no reason, except maybe to mine Q-Master for Compressor.
I love what he has to say:
And back then the same questions were being asked as now – “Doesn’t Apple care about the professional market?”
In a word, no. Not really. Not enough to focus on it as a primary business.
Brinkman goes on to explain that there are maybe 10,000 “high-end” editors in the world while the market for an easier to use more casual product is “at least an order of magnitude larger”. The market size, however, isn’t necessarily the only reason. Brinkmann offers an interesting anecdote about how the high end market tends to be 90% driven by product requests from the big customers. Apple doesn’t work that way:
After the acquisition I remember sitting in a roomful of Hollywood VFX pros where Steve told everybody point-blank that we/Apple were going to focus on giving them powerful tools that were far more cost-effective than what they were accustomed to… but that the relationship between them and Apple wasn’t going to be something where they’d be driving product direction anymore. Didn’t go over particularly well, incidentally, but I don’t think that concerned Steve overmuch… 🙂
Apple’s hierarchy is also described as one in which easily demo-able features tend to be easier to promote within the organization. He goes on to say that in the case of FCP, Apple would rather introduce more easy to use features for the broader audience even if it means pushing out some items for high end editors.