At the end of February Pete Warden tweeted about Apple letting go forty people from the Final Cut Pro teams in LA and Austin.
Although the news was actually followed by an encomiable plea to help some of those people find good jobs elsewhere, it was widely reported with the effect of putting Apple in a bad light and casting dark clouds on Final Cut Pro’s future.
Laying off so many people had to mean that the product wasn’t doing particularly well, right?
Well, not necessarily. AE Portal news remarked that the FC teams seemed to have been cut confidently before the NAB, which is a major Pro media event, and also reminded us that Adobe had laid off much more people: “about 600 workers in 2008 and another 680 in 2009 (about 9% of its workforce each time)”.
It’s also important to take into account how big the developer teams at Apple really are and then try to put the numbers in perspective. Some interesting hints come from Mike Evangelist who was a director of product marketing at Infinite Loop from April 2000 to July 2002.
In 2006, in a comment section of his blog, Evangelist answered that the Final Cut team “was above a hundred” when he was there and that he was “sure it’s much larger now”. So, no need to fear.
Image from www.roughlydrafted.com
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