DaVinci is ridiculously cheap because the entire company is owned by three guys, at least one of whom has a personal, burning disgust for the way that the television industry (in particular, the Australian television industry) used to be run back in the day.
I distinctly remember getting a bizarre company-wide memo at one point, directly from the CEO, where a particular product launch (I think it might have been the Pocket 4K) would assist in democratizing TV production to the point where no company could force the nation to watch Hee-Haw again.
He's genuinely on a mission from God to break up the monopoly in TV production, and profit comes second to that goal.
100% man. I left two years ago due to some major life changes I didn't know how to handle, but still get nostalgic about the place to this day. It's not just the perks, but the culture too - both in terms of striving to improve as professionals and the laid-back, larrikin attitude towards just about everything else.
I run my own business now, but my long-term goal is to be able to create the same environment and provide the same opportunities that Blackmagic gave me.
>coffee daily
You're really underselling Bing there, mate. ;)
(I usually don't really care about potential backdoors from a foreign nation state, but the Australian police has shown itself to be really really helpful with foreign law enforcement agencies. The FBI recently used them to set up a massive sting operation that would've been illegal for the FBI to do on their own.)
Yeah, I mean that probably affects how they setup their pricing, but as you quoted me, it seems you're arguing against my point, rather than adding to it.
Without the hardware side of BMD, I'm not sure how they would be able to sustain the company as it is with just sales of the (very cheap) software. My point was not to say anything about the motivations of the founders, but more about how that price point can remain cheap, even though it costs way more to develop than what they can ever make back from selling just the software.
I don't understand the specifics, but I know Resolve is profitable in its own right (used to have lunch multiple times per week with one of the co-founders).
I think a lot of the IP was picked up during an acquisition, and most of the work on it is done by a fairly lean team up in Singapore.
Of course, that's not to say it's as profitable as it could be, but neither optimising for profit nor making a loss is not the goal of the founders.
How do you get your product in? Easy, release product for free so small time creators, experimenters get familiar. Those people go to work for professional studio, they request davinci since they know it better. Then company further optimizes by buying expensive intergrated hardware to better streamline production...
Its brilliant to see this nonobvious market oppportunity. Further you get extra street creds, as yt people will love your product just for the fact its so accessible (free).
Everybody except Grant Petty. I've definitely heard stories about an expletive-filled rant when Adobe discontinued their "buy once, own forever" products.
Both him and Doug (the other main co-founder) genuinely care more about making good-quality, affordable products than being worth an extra few hundred million.
If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the submission page, you'll notice a bunch of hardware for controlling DaVinci and its modules. It ranges from $400 to $50,00 and they have even more expensive hardware as well. This is where they get most of their profits from, and where the larger companies really spend the money on when it comes to buying from BMD.