Actually, I understand where you are coming from, but your example was inaccurate. Microsoft does use a lot of add ons (and OEM products) from other companies. Their first version of disk compression (when it was popular) was licensed, their terminal emulation program (Hyperterminal) is licenced (OEM'ed) from Hilgraeve. They also provide bounties and incentives for other companies to provide add ons and applications for Windows (having received these financial incentives for altering our product roadmap to cover an area Microsoft requested).

When Microsoft does add a utility into their core product they actually get heat (and sometimes law suits) from the vendors who they have displaced (i.e., Netscape--when they added Explorer, and dozens of PIM's and Contact Mgrs when they added Outlook).

It is similar with Sony. Their users wanted training, so several forum members created it--which was good for us and Sony. Later, Sony came out with their own (which ate sales from previous training products), but made some sense overall for Sony. Sometimes Sony "must" add the feature to be competitive in the reviews--even if they would rather not since other vendors have already filled it.

Fotunately, Vegas has an open API which allows others to fill the holes. If there are enough requests, and enough money to justify the effort, someone will fill the hole (often better than Sony would care to, considering more important product requests).

And the desire for plugins and FX is pretty endless.

I can see them redoing the interfaces for what they've got but adding endless FX just increases their support costs. Better to help others write plug-ins.

The main reason to redo the interfaces is to make things self explanatory and reduce support calls.

Rob Mack

What about Premiere? They depend on Titlemotion Pro for text effects don't they? I know Edius does.

The way I see it most video editors out there have to be well versed in using other media to get things done. Be it, Photoshop, PSP, 3D effects software, etc. I don't think this is gonna change anytime soon because of the complexity of video editing. I am not depending on any one package doing all the things I want it to do, it's simply not realistic to me. Not one package will be able to satisfy anyones needs all the time. The way I see it, I can pick that niche package to fill that gap to my satisfaction.

It's more like microsoft says "We want an anti-spyware function. Lets buy a company that makes one!"

Whem MS put out Win95, wordpad had LESS feature then 3.1 write.

Sony added tons of usefull stuff to Vegas 6. You don't just have a use for it. If you had a duel duel-core Opteron with a declink card then you'd be happy as a clam that vegas takes full advantage of your hardware.

I have no problem with vegas's titler the way it is. I've done some pretty cool stuff with it that most people think was done with a fancy program.

Microsoft also adds feature to control the market place, take down competition, & then create a monopoly. That isn't the goal of the Vegas creators (now that Firefox has 8% of brower market share & IE dropped to the mid 80's, now, after YEARS, MS wants to release an IE 7. Would you prefer sony to do that with vegas? only release features to compete withthe compition or features that help people out now?)

Well put, funny how when MS tries to make a word processor that's more like a page layour program it gets called bloatware. This is the last thing we want happening to Vegas surely.

On top of that all these things cost. At the moment you get a very capable NLE for a great price, you buy the extra tools you need and you get to choose which one suits you, just look at titlers, some find Cayman great, others Boris and yet other prefer the flash based apps. As soon as they add some fancier titler 20% would be happy and the rest of us would winge as we had to pay for something we think sucks.

There's another upside too, those 3rd party tools may well work with other apps apart from Vegas.

Bob.

I rarely use included media generators as I prefer to create my own artwork and images.

There are some things I think Vegas can and will do much better in the future for sure. There's another way to look at this too. Aren't we blessed that we have a program flexible enough to give us a variety of options to choose from to tackle a particular task? I have always enjoyed the flexibility that Vegas has given me.

John