Apple Rumors (and a little news)

I try not to pass along rumors, but there's a scary one that's been floating around enough that I thought I'd mention it. I think it started around the time that Apple said that it was going to skip NAB. The word from the grapevine is that Apple is going to sell its Pro Apps, which includes Final Cut Pro.

The rumor has been pretty persistent, enough for Apple to officially deny it. In Robert Cringely's latest article he says that Apple spent the NAB conference looking for buyers for their Pro Apps. He's been saying for a while that Apple will buy Adobe in order to get Flash. If that's the case, then Cringely thinks that Apple can't keep both their Pro Apps and Adobe's competing products, like Premiere, After Effects, and their other audio-video apps because of anti-trust concerns. He's more convincing than any of the other sources that I've heard with this rumor or similar ones, so I'm a little more concerned about it. Although, Cringely goes on to to suggest that if Apple really did buy Adobe, then it would sell the Adobe apps that compete with Apple's.

I still think it's unlikely that Apple would sell Final Cut Pro, and for that viewpoint there's a short blog at Final Cut User.

For a bit of official news, there was a statement from an Apple employee on why Final Cut Server took so long to appear on the market--nearly a year after it was announced. According to this interview at TVBEurope, Apple went back to the drawing board to make Final Cut Server easy to administer. Apple's marketing director for professional video apps said that they were reworking Final Cut Server so that it could run "without an IT department to support it." Final Cut Server seems to have been based on asset management software that Apple acquired late in 2006 from a company called Proximity. If they were simplifying the software, I can appreciate that. I'm not interested in becoming an IT professional, but I'm the most likely person to set up and run Final Cut Server at Link TV.

In the same article, Apple's marketing guy says that they have sold a million licenses of FCP. He also said that FCP had 49% market share in 2007 versus Avid's 22% share.