Russ Hughes at the blog Pro Tools Expert reported yesterday that four longtime Avid employees have left the company to work for Gobbler, a media cloud platform for music, video and photography professionals:
This includes long time Digidesign/Avid veteran Bobby Lombardi. Lombardi has been at the centre of many of the key developments within Digidesign/Avid and has been regarded as a tour de force within Avid, not only being involved in key products like Pro Tools and Eleven Rack, but Lombardi was also moved in to deal with the fall-out after the closure of the entire Sibelius team in the UK.
However the largest blow for Avid will be the fact that Lombardi was a central player in the new Avid Everywhere initiative, his role was described as;
- Design Lead for Avid’s next generation creative products in collaboration, distribution, and online private and public monetization of digital assets
- Product Management lead for metadata and rights management strategy
Sibelius users will recall, as Russ noted, that Bobby Lombardi headed up Sibelius product management beginning in the summer of 2012. Bobby’s interviews with PSN Europe and Audio Pro International are representative of his mission at the time to explain the future of Sibelius to the community, and it was from Bobby that we first learned of plans for Sibelius 7.5 back in the fall of 2013.
Earlier this year, Sam Butler, a veteran Sibelius and Avid employee, assumed the role of senior product manager, as Bobby moved to focus on Avid Everywhere. In a statement posted today on the Sibelius chat page, Sam assured Sibelius users that Avid’s personnel changes would not affect Sibelius development:
Although it’s sad to see Bobby and others leave Avid, I’d like to reassure you that there’s no change to the direction of Sibelius or our other products and that Joe Pearson (Product Designer) and I are continuing to plan the development the next generation of notation applications and solutions.
Sam also said that “In other news, the Sibelius team is growing. We’re looking to bringing on new developers and we’ve recently added a new tester to the team too.”
Other Avid personnel decamping to Gobbler include software architects and engineers Bob Brown, Andrew Hall, and Brian Chrisman, each of whom had a decade or more of experience working at Avid or Digidesign.
Derek Williams
“If our best don’t leave of their own accord, we’ll fire ’em” – presumed motto of Avid.
If Avid’s appalling sacking of the Sibelius development team, who were immediately snapped up en masse by Yamaha-Steinberg, not to mention its disastrous handling of the Sibelius product itself, is anything to go by, then with the departure of these key personnel, Avid is in even more trouble than we already know about.
This unnecessary death of Avid is slow and agonising, and it’s truly a wonder no hostile takeover bid has been forthcoming to install upper management with vision and flair, since BlackRock, Inc. acquired more than 2.4 million shares of Avid stock in 2012.
Laurent
–Sam also said that “In other news, the Sibelius team is growing. We’re looking to bringing on new developers and we’ve recently added a new tester to the team too.”
Well the developers you fired were damn good, why not bring them back ?
Clarke Isackson
I can understand the disappointment of working for a company that is not looking for perfection. My latest upgrade purchase did not work, no matter how much the team tried to help. My PCs are running on appropriate OS. I hate to say it, but am glad, I switched to the latest version of Finale 2014 and am not looking back.
Michel Heydemann
I recently commented that product integration as announced by Avid for several products reminded me of what I experienced at the IC CAD design software companies I worked for in the past: a way to keep customers while startup companies develop better innovative products…
The departure of several key employees is also something I experienced within the same kind of context: company goes across sales problems and good folks leave as a result.
This doesn’t prevent a company to survive specially if it has a large customer base and if it is able to acquire the innovative startup companies !! Again by personal experience.
Future will tell …