DMN Interview, Part 2: Premiere Pro Premieres
Page 3 of 5
DMN: What percentage was that?
Townhill: [Pauses] Well, let's say it's at least 90 percent.
DMN: Really?
Townhill: Yes, so there's a considerable number of people, and this is largely for historical reasons. For example, getting video into a computer was traditionally quite complicated. You needed to buy dedicated hardware. So what happened was, we had a number of OEM partners in people like Matrox and Canopus who would build hardware to get video in and out. This hardware was built for the PC. They didn't really design cards for the Mac. So, consequently, it became much easier to get video in and out of a computer, in the midrange products which was where Premiere was originally targeted, so our user base naturally migrated into the PC spectrum. So if we built a Mac product we'd be building it for a very small percentage of our users.
DMN: It's not cost-effective to spend three years to develop a Mac app.
Townhill: That's precisely the point. So real time is highly important, and I mentioned to you, all the optimizations that we've done to the Intel chip set. In order to be able get similar performance under OS X, we'd have to optimize for QuickTime, and all the latest architecture out of Apple. The truth is, it would effectively be like writing a completely separate application. None of the core components remain the same and the video engine is obviously the key component of the application. So you're effectively either doubling your engineering team or taking twice as long to release the application -- for less than ten percent of your user base.
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DMN: It's business decision. Look at the numbers.
Townhill: I really want to stress the point -- I don't want this to be interpreted as a global war between Adobe and Apple. It's very simply a business decision. If you asked the Photoshop team the same question, their answer would be very different.
DMN: What if Apple developed a competitor to Photoshop? Then would there be a war?
Townhill: Well, then there would be competition.
DMN: Again, it's competition.
Townhill: I don’t know whether I really like the expression "war," but I think, naturally, Apple are competition in the video space. They are not so much competition in the image editing space. But who knows? They may well prove to be a competitor going forward. It's impossible for me to answer that question, really. But at that point, you know, Photoshop has to make the same business decisions that we made. And, if the user base split remains the same, then they will probably decide not to drop the Mac platform. Again, I stress, it's a business decision. If we ever got into the situation where, less than ten percent of our users were on the Mac, on Photoshop, then, sure, they may well make that call. But that is definitely not the case right now, and I'd really rather not speculate too much about whether we'll drop the Mac platform anywhere else than under Premiere right now.
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