Agreed. And if you write down in your diary/notebook what have you when you recognize you're happy and having fun. Then write down as much of what you can capture about why. That will give you a tool to use to figure out where to go next to maximize your engagement level with your next task.
Sonic Foundry had incredible products (Vegas, Acid) but they don't appear to have enjoyed the success they deserved? They have been acquired many times, once by Sony and then by Magic, and the most recent versions of the software are years old.
Yet these products are among the most stable and user-friendly that I have come across. It would be most interesting to read more about their journey!
The Sonic Foundry software was uniformly excellent. It’s perhaps a cautionary tale as to how much market structure is as much, if not more, of a factor in ultimate business success.
My perception was that the principles determined that the market they were in, the audio/media authoring tools space, would not support a business of the scale that they aspired to, or perhaps that their investors expected.
They managed to position themselves as being a “dot com” company (not implausibly) and the stock price shot up 20x.
Efforts to build a business with potential to grow into the now sky high valuation centered around a strategy of media encoding. (Moving Media Online was the rather on point slogan.) Ultimately this proved not to be a viable business, but resources were diverted from the existing media tools product lines. This prevented the media software from capitalizing on some of the profound advantages it offered over competing products, and from staying competitive in the small and fiercely fought audio production space.
Similarly, though Vegas was excellent, and forward looking, video editing software, it never received the sustained investment required to break into the realms of the market leaders.
Eventually the company brought back some attention to the media tools product line, but the financial realities and missed opportunities to keep the software competitive forced the sale of those assets to Sony.
I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform. I’m an audio engineer, so I’m not as familiar with the needs of the market, but Vegas actually struck me as being far ahead of other native video editing software. It was also very easy to learn and use.
I worked with Sonic Foundry as a sound designer, so my perspective is from the periphery. I’m sure the insiders would have a far more detailed description of the various branching strands of stories.
It’s nice to read Monte’s recollections of a fascinating time.
Acid never struck me as something particularly widely used. I was big into electronic music production at the time and I started with Acid + Sound Forge but eventually moved on to Reason and later Ableton + Reason. People who were doing a lot of multitrack editing seemed pretty loyal to Cubase (or Pro Tools if they were using Macs) and then Ableton came along and became extremely popular.
Crazy that Soundforge was built with such a small team.
Playing around with Soundforge as a teenager in 1998 and looping samples together was super inspiring for me. Anyone could make professional sounding music from their computer, and using it also piqued my interest in building software.
[+] [-] lallysingh|8 years ago|reply
> I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|8 years ago|reply
Yet these products are among the most stable and user-friendly that I have come across. It would be most interesting to read more about their journey!
[+] [-] b1daly|8 years ago|reply
My perception was that the principles determined that the market they were in, the audio/media authoring tools space, would not support a business of the scale that they aspired to, or perhaps that their investors expected.
They managed to position themselves as being a “dot com” company (not implausibly) and the stock price shot up 20x.
Efforts to build a business with potential to grow into the now sky high valuation centered around a strategy of media encoding. (Moving Media Online was the rather on point slogan.) Ultimately this proved not to be a viable business, but resources were diverted from the existing media tools product lines. This prevented the media software from capitalizing on some of the profound advantages it offered over competing products, and from staying competitive in the small and fiercely fought audio production space.
Similarly, though Vegas was excellent, and forward looking, video editing software, it never received the sustained investment required to break into the realms of the market leaders.
Eventually the company brought back some attention to the media tools product line, but the financial realities and missed opportunities to keep the software competitive forced the sale of those assets to Sony.
I always found it strange that Sony wasn’t able to do my more to get Vegas established as a leading video editing platform. I’m an audio engineer, so I’m not as familiar with the needs of the market, but Vegas actually struck me as being far ahead of other native video editing software. It was also very easy to learn and use.
I worked with Sonic Foundry as a sound designer, so my perspective is from the periphery. I’m sure the insiders would have a far more detailed description of the various branching strands of stories.
It’s nice to read Monte’s recollections of a fascinating time.
[+] [-] jgh|8 years ago|reply
Sound Forge is of course in a class of its own.
[+] [-] ryanb|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanb|8 years ago|reply
Playing around with Soundforge as a teenager in 1998 and looping samples together was super inspiring for me. Anyone could make professional sounding music from their computer, and using it also piqued my interest in building software.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|8 years ago|reply