The thing I am having trouble with is that Apple is a company that understands marketing pretty well. Given that assumption, it just baffles me while they would roll out the program in the way that they have. If they had really consulted "pros" in a systematic way pre-release, a lot of complaints made above would surely have surfaced. And yet they decided to go ahead -- for reasons, I bet, that have little to do with the app itself. Would it not make sense to say out loud this is the first step in a long development road and that provide a clearer roadmap. Yanking FCP 7.0/FCS 3 without explanation surely did not send the right message.
(As an aside, I wonder if the reason they pulled 7 is they didn't want the new product competing directly with the new one.)
It smacks of internal corporate politics, and a certain hubris, and a worrying lack of thinking important issues trough. Frankly, it makes me wonder about the consequences of Steve Job's illness.
I'd bet that somewhere in a bar in Cupertino there's a bunch of Apple employees saying "we told them, but they wouldn't listen."
Looking at the FCP marketing page, what's striking is the lack of focus of the message on the needs of ANY group of users. The claims are basically four:
1) FCP makes editing "faster, more fluid, and more flexible than ever before."
2) FCP makes organizing media easier. (I guess this is why FCP server is not longer needed.)
3) FCP is fast.
4) FCP "is a single application for the entire post-production workflow." (THE workflow? Aren't there many?)
What' striking is that these are fairly broad, vague statements even by marketing standards, and suggest to me this is a product that Apple's marketing team does not know how to sell. That could be because the whole redevelopment effort has been poorly focused and/or the subject of significant internal debate and/or apathy. This is the best case Apple could make for a "revolution"? Give me a break.
What missing is marketing that one used to see for FCP -- the video of the BBC executive saying how critical the product would be to his organization's future and how its features were not available on other products etc. The white papers on the feature and innovations etc.
Interestingly, as of this morning, if one goes to www.apple.com/pro , the pro video app was still being represented by a photo of a FCS 3 box.