DMN Interview: Premiere Pro Premieres (Parts 1, 2 and 3 combined)
Page 7 of 9
DMN: Is it going to be Premiere Pro 2.0, and 3.0, are we starting over again with the numbers?
Townhill: [Laughs] Adobe doesn't comment on unannounced products. [They both laugh]. Being completely candid, because I don't think our version number really matters that much, we will probably extend the numbering system we already have, so this version is Premiere Pro, the next one will be Premiere 7.x, or 8-dot-whatever it will be.
DMN: That makes sense. Because then it doesn't seem like a 1.0 product. I mean who wants to be that?
Townhill: [Laughs] Right.
DMN: Do you have some big marketing plans? I understand you've seeded this application into some big production companies.
Townhill: We're in the process of doing that right now.
DMN: You're looking to position this on a more professional level -- lining up with some big-time hardware.
Townhill: Exactly.
DMN: You're doing this a bit differently from the old multimedia route.
Townhill: Yes, really. We're also very realistic about Premiere's reputation. We want to make sure that people know, as I said this morning, "This is not your father's Premiere." It's a very different beast from what it was before. And so, we have our work cut out, to regain some credibility. And I think it's only fair that that is the case. As a result, we're asking people to take a serious look at this. We have some big names interested in taking a look at Premiere.
DMN: Any names for us?
Townhill: We're under NDA with them as they are with us, so…
DMN: Did you consider renaming the whole shebang, I mean, instead of "Premiere," I guess every name that you thought of had to have the word "Pro" after it, right? Sort of a target, perhaps?
Townhill: The problem is that Premiere Pro now sounds a little bit passé (laughs). You've got Final Cut Pro, right? Ulead Media Studio Pro, you've got Edition Pro, and all this kind of stuff. All I can tell you is that we made the naming decision way before any of those applications came out.
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DMN: OK, so you were first -- never mind any of those others?
Townhill: We were first, even though we didn't make any announcements about it. Seriously, when you re-design an application to this level, then obviously one of the questions you ask yourself is, should we call it something different? And actually, we decided not to, largely because we're still proud of the previous releases of Premiere.
DMN: You have some branding with Premiere.
Townhill: We have about a million users who are really happy with their existing product -- they are loyal users. The Premiere brand name, sure, it had some credibility issues at the professional end, but the truth is that more people are making money using Premiere right now than they are using Avid, Final Cut, or anything like that, because there are simply so many people using it, and we honestly felt that there was really good value in the brand. It's a well-known brand, it's a well-known application. This is an extension of that brand. I think it's important to realize that I don't want to sound like I'm sitting here trashing previous versions of Premiere, because I think they were really good pieces of software. They just weren't targeted at a more professional audience, and that's the decision we made with this. We said, "OK, we're going to target the professional audience. We're going to do with Premiere what we did with Photoshop many years ago. It's going to be a professional product. If it's good enough for Time magazine, it's good enough for you." That's the decision that we've made with Premiere. And so, as a result, we felt we wanted to keep the name, because the Premiere name has credibility, the Premiere name is extremely well-valued.
DMN: How many people develop Premiere? Do you have hundreds of people working on it all the time? Is that a secret?
Townhill: Well, no, I don't believe it's a secret. We have an engineering team of about 20 people on-site in San Jose, we have a QA team of about 20 people on-site in San Jose. However, Adobe has a fairly large operation in India. So actually, the number of people who actually work on Premiere is reasonably flexible, because we have engineering staff and QA teams in India which help us on particular modules. For example, all of our export tools that you see were all handled in India. So actually, it's a fairly worldwide effort. So the legitimate answer to your question is, it varies. In terms of hard numbers of full-time staff in the United States at the headquarters in San Jose, there are about 80 to 100 people if you include the product management team and the marketing team, and the engineering and QA teams.
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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