Keep in mind that SONY is a huge conglomerate with many different divisions. Each division can operate pretty much independantly of the others. SONY electronics markets PCs, but the Vegas software line is owned by SONY Pictures Digital. <tongue in cheek mode>The PC folks may not even know that their own company owns Premiere's biggest competitor.</tongue in cheek mode> Also keep in mind that the decision to change what is included with a line of computers is big. They don't dare make that decision lightly lest a large group of potential buyers say "well, i was going to buy a VAIO for video editing but they don't include Premiere anymore so i guess i'll go look elsewhere." Vegas has to become a household name first before they can risk their computer line sales on it. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Vegas isn't there yet.

VAIO 's come with a special version of tmpgenc mpeg encoder also -- as well sony has devoloped thier own mpeg2 reader codec ...

look at one division of sony selling mp3 players and dvd recoders and another division complaining about such devices being sold ..

Capitalism's great ain't it.
But here's a thought, not that anyone that matters in Sony is ever going to see this, they could include a coupon for a free / discounted copy of Vegas
It's no wonder that Premiere is so widespread, you can buy the whole suite with a reasonable kit of capture hardware for less than the price of the software.

So true on the bundle bargain! 1500$ Canadian for the Matrox RT X100 c/w great capture board (real time MPEG2 and DV AVI), Adobe Premiere Pro, Encore DVD authoring tool and Audition AKA Cakewalk. That's about the same price as the retail version of Vegas 5/DVD-A 2. No, I am not endorsing Adobe PPro et al. PPro 1 crashes or locks up frequently and the buggers at Adobe want 199$ to upgrade to bug fixed ver 1.5. I'm going to upgrade but I feel cheated.

Peter

> That's not a very good endorsement of your own product.

You have to understand that the PC division of Sony is measured by how many PC’s they sell. This is a direct result of how well they match customer demand. If customers want Premiere, then it’s the job of Sony Digital Pictures to turn customers around NOT the PC division.

Since you used IBM as an example, here is the opposite affect. All IBM desktops (until very recently) shipped with Lotus SmartSuite instead of Microsoft Office because IBM bought Lotus. Customers didn’t want Lotus SmartSuite but they had no choice. Customers had to factor in the additional price of MS Office when buying an IBM PC. This is not good for the customer. So IBM gave the customer a choice and what do you think they pick? (MS Office of course).

I would guess that if Sony PC division stopped selling PC’s with Premiere it would hurt their sales. It would be nice if, in addition, they also offered PC’s with a Vegas bundle but in the end, the customer demand is what wins. So they have to make the customers want Vegas.

> It reminds me of IBM salespeople who used to walk around with Windows 95 on their laptops instead of the IBM developed OS/2. Subsquently OS/2 quickly died.

Apparently, reports of OS/2’s death have been greatly exaggerated. ;-) OS/2 did not die. You can learn about the OS/2 strategy for 2004. It is still being used in business like banking and other critical real-time systems because it is a far superior server operating system that that Microsoft NT/XP junk (which requires you to reboot a server because you installed a word processor on it! Oh yea, that’s a 24/7 system (NOT!)) My Windows XP system can easily be locked up solid by a single application. This doesn’t happen on OS/2 because the OS is in control of dispatching (not the application relinquishing control to the OS... or not!)

OS/2 is no longer a desktop operating system, NOT because IBM sales people used Windows 95, but because it failed to capture the desktop application market. So IBM sales people used Windows 95 because they needed it to run their desktop applications and OS/2 only supported Windows 3.1 (because of existing licensing agreements with Microsoft).

~jr

"Vegas has to become a household name first before they can risk their computer line sales on it"

As it stands now they risk their sales on the "awesome" DVgate so I doubt that Vegas and Screenblast Movie Studio (Vegas LE) would bring the house down.

Screenblast Acid seems to have made Sony's cut but they chose Premiere for the mid and high level video editing customers-- yuck. If I recall corectly it's Premiere 6.5 and Premiere LE 6.5-- double yuck!

How do they expect Vegas to become "a household name" (Videomaker Magazine Product of the Year???) if they don't endorse it themselves? (Please See IBM example above) Can you imagine if Apple would have started pushing Avid Xpress as the upgrade to iMovie and kept FCP and Final Cut Express in the background? Sure, the Pros would have found and used FCP but they layperson would have never even heard of Final Cut. It would have prevented Final Cut from being a "household name".
Sometimes you have to just bite the bullet, stand up for yourself, and see what happens. They need to give Adobe the finger and let Vegas shine.

"All IBM desktops (until very recently) shipped with Lotus SmartSuite instead of Microsoft Office because IBM bought Lotus. Customers didn’t want Lotus SmartSuite but they had no choice. Customers had to factor in the additional price of MS Office when buying an IBM PC. This is not good for the customer."

Lotus Smartsuite is more like the business version of Microsoft Works than Office. That's why customers didn't want it. IBM always gave customers the choice to pay extra for MS Office-- that choice was never taken away.

I highly doubt customers are gonna go running for the hills simply because Sony replaced Premiere LE with Screenblast Movie Studio. As you know Screenblast shares it's interface with Screenblast Acid, which is bundle with Sony computers, and is far easier than Premiere for the average consumer to understand. It can only help things if the UI's of Sony's bundled programs had some similarities thereby lowering the learning curve assoiciated.

Remember that SEL (Sony Electronics) Sony Broadcast, SMS (Sony Media Software) and Sony Pictures Digital are all different companies. They work together, somewhat. But they are very competitive within their own confines, doing whatever they need to to show a bottom line. Granted, it would be better if Vegas was the bundled package, but (and not knowing anything specific) it may well be that SEL has an XXX month/year contract with Adobe and other vendors that they must honor, and it hasn't even been 9 months since Vegas became a Sony product. Sony's a big company. They don't move fast. But when they move, it's a big and and noticeable move.

> I highly doubt customers are gonna go running for the hills simply because Sony replaced Premiere LE with Screenblast Movie Studio.

I agree with you. If these PC’s are targeting new NLE customers then Sony should start them off with the right Sony product. I was thinking more of turnkey NLE systems for the advanced user. As Spot pointed out, it takes a long time for large companies to sync up their strategies and current contracts need to be honored. I’m sure over time we’ll see the shift toward the Screenblast / Vegas product line.

~jr

Ahem...

Audition is not Cakewalk. Audition is the descendant of Cool Edit Pro from Syntrillium. Adobe even forgot to take out some of the Syntrillium/CEP references in the help file of Audition 1.0.

OS2 was actually developed by Microsoft for IBM, but IBM owned it.

"reboot a server because you installed a word processor on it!"


not required anymore

> OS2 was actually developed by Microsoft for IBM

If that were even remotely true, how to you explain how superior OS/2 is to NT? Not to mention the fact that OS/2 version 2 shipped a year earlier and ran circles around NT performance and stability wise. I think I still have my videotape of the OS/2 vs NT shoot out. (OK, so I’m a pack rat) OS/2 was running maybe a dozen applications (including several copies of Windows 3.1) while NT was struggling to run just three or four. Then they ran a program who’s sole purpose was to trap the operating system. OS/2 gracefully suggest that it close the rouge application while NT gave its Blue Screen Of Death and need to be rebooted to recover. Oh yea, Microsoft developed the good stuff for IBM and kept the bad stuff for themselves. NOT!

True OS2 version 1 started out as a joint development project between IBM and Microsoft and unfortunately, Microsoft wanted to take it in a direction that IBM felt would compromise its robustness. So Microsoft and IBM parted ways. IBM continued the project as OS/2 and Microsoft took their code base and created NT a year after. IBM was the sole developer of OS/2 from version 2 on. (the OS/2 developers were in IBM’s Boca Raton lab)

That’s why HPFS and NTFS are so compatible. They came from the same source. IBM knows quite a bit about writing journaled file systems (having created quite a few robust ones in the past) and NT would still be using FAT32 if it wasn’t for IBM’s JFS contribution. BTW, IBM also contributed its journaled filesystem technology to Linux (open source) allowing it to recover from crashes in minutes instead of hours.

We had a slogan for OS/2: Not just up and coming, but up and running! (NT shipped much later than it promised but, funny, no one remembers today how late or buggy the original NT launch was) We use to joke that it stood for Nice Try, I still have a tee shirt to that effect. Windows XP today is finally getting some of the functionality that OS/2 Workplace Shell had 10 years ago. But I digress...

Now we are way off topic. ;-)

~jr

> not required anymore

Maybe not for a word processor anymore but I can install Orcale, or IBM DB2 on OS/2 (or Linux, or AIX) and just start using it immediately. Try and install Microsoft SQL Server on Windows NT/XP without having to rebooting the machine. (probably several times as it whines about missing pre-req code and makes you install that and reboot several times) It’s getting better but its not a 24/7 operating system.

OK now we're way off topic (but Vegas 5 for Linux would be nice) ;-)

~jr

JR, you should probably mention somewhere in this line of discussion that you write code for IBM. :-)

Awe Spot, you’re ruinin’ all the fun. ;-)

Yes. I didn’t want to sound like, “I’m from IBM so I aught to know” because I’m painfully aware that companies like IBM and Sony are so large that we really can’t know everything that’s going on in the company, but yes, I’ve worked for IBM for 20 years. (but you could have figured that out by visiting my web site and looking at my patent links which are all owned by IBM, or looked at how many papers I’ve published in the IBM Systems Journal which all give my bio and history at IBM)

I designed and developed some major applications on OS/2 back in the late 80’s early 90’s (I was the chief architect of IBM OS/2 Visual Warehouse) and it was quite painful to move those applications (and application development in general) to NT. So perhaps my view is biased because I saw the IBM side of the story and not the Microsoft side of the story (ok, ok... my views are definitely biased, I admit) but Microsoft definitely did not develop OS/2 for us.

Disclaimer: BTW, IBM has a strict policy that any employee in a public forum represents themselves and not the views of IBM so I have to mention these are my personal views and not the views of IBM.

~jr