[Michael Zull]

I have no fear over the direction that Avid is trying to head in, because it will pretty much work itself out in the end, as it always has to some extent.

It's the same thing that the IT industry has been doing for a number of years now, trying to push everyone to the cloud and into Managed Service contracts. My overall view of these models is that they obviously work out well for the provider, bringing in steadier revenue streams every month. The problem is that, at least in my experience with an established client base, very few business owners were biting when it came to Managed Service agreements (ie. Avid Support Plan). Only in a few cases did we see it have a substantial benefit for small to medium business owners, which were the majority of our clients. I don't need, well, ANY direct support from Avid other than them working on bug fixes behind the scenes, and I'd hate to see money diverted from that into beefing up call centers or other superfluous "customer service" that seasoned PT users don't need.

In the case of cloud services (ie. Pro Tools Cloud Collaboration features) we did see more interest, and clients were buying reasonably priced a-la-carte services based on their needs. The vast majority of us are not going to be using the Cloud stuff, at least not now. It should be sold as an add-on for businesses (post houses etc.) that would really benefit from it. Again, I'd hate to see Avid dumping money into servers or whatever other expenses they will need to incur to make this work, over bug fixes and universally useful features.

The conclusion that myself and my old IT employer came to is that, while we will continue to offer Managed Service agreements and cloud services, there is an extent to which pushing that kind of stuff on clients just pisses them off. They will call us when they need us, and that's fine with both of us, we are happy to be there to help when the need arises. I hope Avid sees that that is how the relationship should be, a happy arrangement for everyone involved. You wanna charge me more for Vanilla licenses and version updates? Fine, charge me $1k for new licenses and $300-$400 for version upgrades, if and when I want or need them. But at this point, I don't want them in my pocket for support plans or subscriptions. Perhaps that might change in the future, but Avid needs to understand that they need to establish value in what they are peddling and ease us into it, again, if and when we want or need those services. At my old employer it became quite clear to us that pushing people too hard towards the model we wanted them to be in was never going to work for some clients, and the ones that were biting at all needed to test the waters before committing.

Why am I not fearful of what Avid is doing? Because either it's going to work out for everyone or it's not. If it does, and there is real value in what they are selling, everyone will be happy. If it doesn't, and no one is biting, then they will eventually come to their senses, abandon it, and pick up the pieces and move on (whatever that will entail). I'm parking my licenses on the versions they are currently at and getting my rigs stable in preparation.

I will say one thing...if I ever told any of our Managed Service clients that, if they didn't renew their agreement with us, that we were going to hit them with a big charge to get them reinstated, they would have laughed in my face. That's just plain extortion. I'm still a bit confused as to how everything is going down, but this particular point, if true, is just asking to piss people off.