Well it looks like Avid has a new CEO at the helm and it’s not me. Seems to be some cat named Gary Greenfield. Never heard of him? Neither have I. Seems he came from some company called GXS. I thought GXS would have been a railroad company but according to the Avid press release GXS is “a leading worldwide provider of business-to-business integration, synchronization and collaboration solutions. Since December 2003, he has also been an operating partner with Francisco Partners, a leading technology-focused private equity firm.” I don’t see much about video, film, television or post-production in that description. Greenfield also has “served as CEO of Peregrine Systems where he managed the restructuring of their business.” Wasn’t Peregrine Systems the company that the scientist guy worked for in Terminator 2: Judgement Day? In addition to all that he has been “president and CEO of MERANT; and while CEO of INTERSOLV, they merged with Micro Focus to form MERANT.” Hmmm… sounds like maybe a pharmaceutical company to me. The press release goes on to talk about compensation packages and stock options and other mind numbing publicly traded big-company-business clap-trap. Who cares? Shareholders maybe but as an editor dependent on Avid products I want to see some concrete plans from this guy on what he is going to do to continue to improve Avid’s products, provided better support from the company, listen to customers and compete with Final Cut Pro. And if he takes the company private and tries to please customers instead of shareholders then even better. There’s other coverage and comments around the web and I’m sure there will be more as Gary begins his reign. I just hope there is a lot of good stuff to comment on!