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Suddenly, the OSC saga was over.
As is often the case in Silicon Valley's hyperactive economy, OSC alumni didn't have a hard time finding jobs. Dalton and Rosen are partners in a SOMA movie sound studio, and Dalton is working on his own software, which, if successful, would allow Internet search engines to seek for images, rather than word cues. Myrberg is also working as a software engineer.
The OSC boys lost their battle to create a successful Silicon Valley start-up. But some of them find consolation in the idea that they won the war to bring studio-quality recording to the masses.
Todd Souvignier says this came to him in an epiphany, as he strolled down the aisles of a computer show last fall. Deck-style hard-disk recording has become so ubiquitous, and new entrants into the field have become so many, that Souvignier ran across a booth giving away a product very much like Deck for free, as part of a larger sound production package. The package is called Pro Tools III With Power Mix. It is made by Digidesign, the company that had tried to keep OSC's efforts out of the hands of all but the most well-heeled customers.
"I'm saying we won. We got to a place in 1996 where hard-disk recording can be given away for free. We had to throw ourselves on our swords to win, but we won," says Souvignier.
Even so, the former OSC boys will never work on improving Deck, or feel like they own it, again. They won't take as many marijuana breaks, jam-session breaks, or whiskey breaks at work. And they probably won't ever again be cutting-edge, anti-establishment digital revolutionaries, because they've already been eaten by regular old capitalism, the way start-ups ordinary and extraordinary so often are.
Silicon Valley magazines may chant that digital man is a new breed living by new economic rules. He's not. The OSC story -- its founders' brash conceits and seat-of-the-pants survival skills, the miscalculations that led to its sale, the pandemonium that led to its demise -- is the tale of entrepreneurial failure that has always been a part of American business, even and especially when business is booming. Here as everywhere in the world of capitalism, brilliant start-ups fail by the barrelful, gaggles of geniuses are made dunces every day, dreams get shattered, idealism is torn asunder, and a good time is had by all.
For a very short cool, hip, memorable while.
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