> I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
Yet these products are among the most stable and user-friendly that I have come across. It would be most interesting to read more about their journey!
My perception was that the principles determined that the market they were in, the audio/media authoring tools space, would not support a business of the scale that they aspired to, or perhaps that their investors expected.
They managed to position themselves as being a “dot com” company (not implausibly) and the stock price shot up 20x.
Efforts to build a business with potential to grow into the now sky high valuation centered around a strategy of media encoding. (Moving Media Online was the rather on point slogan.) Ultimately this proved not to be a viable business, but resources were diverted from the existing media tools product lines. This prevented the media software from capitalizing on some of the profound advantages it offered over competing products, and from staying competitive in the small and fiercely fought audio production space.
Similarly, though Vegas was excellent, and forward looking, video editing software, it never received the sustained investment required to break into the realms of the market leaders.
Eventually the company brought back some attention to the media tools product line, but the financial realities and missed opportunities to keep the software competitive forced the sale of those assets to Sony.
I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform. I’m an audio engineer, so I’m not as familiar with the needs of the market, but Vegas actually struck me as being far ahead of other native video editing software. It was also very easy to learn and use.
I worked with Sonic Foundry as a sound designer, so my perspective is from the periphery. I’m sure the insiders would have a far more detailed description of the various branching strands of stories.
It’s nice to read Monte’s recollections of a fascinating time.
Silos. Sony was (is?) a collection of companies that often didn't cooperate well. After the acquisition, SCS was under the heading of Sony Corporation of America. (SCA) They did little to interfere with the company and they had some fun perks, but they didn't seem to be able to do much to support or grow the products either. Want to add support for <$$$$ broadcast hardware>? SCA couldn't arrange a loan, or get you next year’s model before it launched.
Sometime around the economic collapse of '08, SCS was transferred under the heading of Sony Electronics and it felt like there was more support and more of an effort to promote the products of SCS by Sony (and we could finally borrow hardware!), but the market had moved on and SCS never regained its former glory.
Sound Forge is of course in a class of its own.
Acid was pretty fun to play with. I will outright admit I did not purchase my copy.
Playing around with Soundforge as a teenager in 1998 and looping samples together was super inspiring for me. Anyone could make professional sounding music from their computer, and using it also piqued my interest in building software.
