Category: Publishing & media (Page 45 of 53)

For several years Thomson Learning was my largest consulting customer, and while I have not worked closely with the group for several years, it would be inappropriate for me to analyse or comment. I just wish to note for the record, quoting directly and exclusively from Thomson’s own press release of October 25:

Thomson Announces Strategic Realignment of Operations; Company to Sell Education Businesses
Highly Focused Strategy On Electronic Solutions For Professionals Will Drive Growth And Enhance Shareholder Value

Strategic Realignment Highlights:

• Thomson organizational realignment designed to focus on electronic workflow solutions strategy and drive operational efficiencies
• Thomson to divest education assets: higher education, careers and library reference; corporate e-learning; and e-testing
• Vice Chairman and Chief Operating Officer are appointed

Stamford, Conn. , 10/25/2006.  The Thomson Corporation (NYSE: TOC; TSX: TOC) today announced a realignment of operations to sharpen its strategic focus on providing electronic workflow solutions to business and professional markets and better position the company for future growth. As part of the realignment, which becomes effective January 1, 2007, Thomson intends to sell its Thomson Learning businesses, including those serving the higher education, careers, library reference, corporate e-learning and e-testing markets.

“These initiatives are part of the natural evolution of Thomson as we pursue our strategic vision,” said Richard J. Harrington, president and chief executive officer of Thomson. “The market has validated our strategy of providing workflow solutions to business and professional customers, and we will continue to build on our strengths, reframe our markets and exploit technological innovations.

“Thomson Learning is an excellent business, but it does not fit with our long-term strategic vision,” Mr. Harrington said. “After the sale of Thomson Learning, the vast majority of our sales will come from electronic products and services with recurring revenues that are currently growing at high rates. In addition, the sale will provide us with substantial resources to take advantage of opportunities to accelerate the development of our core businesses and explore adjacent markets that are consistent with our strategy.”

Thomson Learning Sale
“Thomson Learning has leading positions in higher education, global reference, e-testing and corporate training,” Mr. Harrington said. “This well-managed and profitable business consistently delivers above-market growth and is well positioned to pursue opportunities in the global markets it serves.”

Thomson expects the divestiture of the Thomson Learning businesses to encompass three independent sales processes, each on its own schedule.
(The press release continues with details of divestitutres and staff changes.)

And so it goes…How sad. Print is certainly becoming a dirty word!

On Monday, in the wee hours of the night (my email was sent at 12:27 a.m.) Adobe emitted three short press releases announcing Acrobat 8. I’m a fan of Acrobat and PDF, so I always look forward to new versions of this ungainly but hugely-popular product. Sadly release #8, at first look-see, leaves me thoroughly unmoved.

The main press release captures the excitement behind the announcement: “The Acrobat 8 product line introduces several major innovations in the areas of document collaboration, PDF content reuse, PDF forms, packaging of multiple documents, and controlling sensitive information. For example, shared reviews put collaboration within the reach of virtually anyone with access to a shared network folder and Adobe Reader2. A participant in a shared review can see comments posted by others, track the status of the review, and work even when not connected – reducing duplicated work and enabling large groups to collaborate more efficiently. Acrobat 8 also enables PDF content to be exported into popular formats to enable reuse and repurposing of content.”

Most of these “innovations” are just “new and improved” old features.

If you’re looking for news, press release #2 is where to turn. Macromedia Breeze is now called Acrobat Connect, and will be available at a lower price-point and to smaller groups of users than the old not-so-gentle Breeze. This represents the first fruit of Adobe’s $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia. How do ya like them apples?
Press release #3 reveals that Adobe will continue to nurse Acrobat and PDF through its severe case of schizophrenia. Acrobat 8 ($449 by itself) will also be bundled into the awkwardly named Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Premium edition ($1199). This is “to enable creative and print professionals to efficiently create, collaborate with, and automate output of Adobe PDF files.”

A few years back, Adobe came close to abandoning this group of PDF enthusiasts (and major buyers of Creative Suite). It realized the gross error of its ways at the 11th hour, and now makes sure to invite them for tea each time there’s something new happening with Acrobat. The features that appeal to “creative and print professionals” bear little resemblance to the features that appeal to the “knowledge workers,” who remain the big buyers of Acrobat itself. So while each group is told a slightly different story, Acrobat’s schizophrenia has not blocked its ever-growing popularity.

Also in press release #3 we find the second instance of the fruit-bearing acquisition. Not surprisingly, Adobe has decided to jettison the never-very-successful GoLive out of Creative Suite in favor of the incredibly successful Dreamweaver. Saving face, somewhat unconvincingly, we’re informed that “Adobe will continue to develop GoLive as a standalone product.” Right. That’s until Adobe finishes getting a little cash off the GoLive orphans as they make the switch (“upgrade”) to Dreamweaver.

The word on the street is that Creative Suite itself will be upgraded to V3 by early next year. Perhaps then the flaccid features of Acrobat 8 will start to make more sense. Or maybe some knowledge workers will acquire some knowledge, enough to tell us why this upgrade was released.

There is an amendment being considered in the House of Representative to tackle the digital music phenomenon yet again. Called the “Section 115 Reform Act of 2006,” it focuses specifically on “licenses for digital uses of musical works.” Having gotten my 11 year old daughter her coveted iPod at the end of May, this caught my eye. The draft discussion is dated May 12.

According to Chris Lindquist over at the CIO Magazine blog, the bill “could make it necessary to acquire licenses for every digital copy of content, even cached, network, and RAM buffer reproductions.” Makes one wonder what bills may be in store for digital content in general, not just in the music industry…

On May 9, I was one of several speakers at an Innodata-Isogen event, “Future Tense – Emerging Trends in Publishing Workflow Management.” They have now posted the presentations and accompanying podcasts. Registration is required, but there are a number of interesting presentations and case studies, including ones from The New Yorker, Houghton Mifflin, Time Out New York, and Harvard Business School Publishing.

(Full disclosure: I’ve consulted many times with Quark and with Adobe, and was specifically hired by Quark to prepare a brochure called QuarkXPress 7 for Output Service Providers.)

I think that QuarkXPress 7 is an important release for Quark, its customers, Adobe and the publishing industry. We’re well past the days of “feature wars,” so, for example, the addition of OpenType support, something first offered in InDesign 1.5 five years ago, is not shaking my world. There is also new support for transparency, improved color management and PDF support, and various other goodies that you’d expect to find in your Christmas stocking, but none of these are anything much more than “overdue.”

What’s most important from my perspective is Quark’s forward strides in supporting improved publishing workflows, the last frontier for the electronic publishing industry. Two new features stand out in this respect. One is “Job Jackets” and the other is JDF (Job Definition Format) support.

According to CIP4 (www.cip4.org) the non-profit industry association pushing JDF, “JDF is a comprehensive XML-based file format and proposed industry standard for end-to-end job ticket specifications combined with a message description standard and message interchange protocol.” Along with its earlier incarnations, JDF has been in the making for more than 15 years now. It has very broad industry support – hundreds of vendors have added JDF functionality to hundreds of hardware and software products. That being said, it’s still a challenge to find a robust JDF-based publishing installation in the field. The main reasons for this are the complexity of the standard and the need for all of the players in a broad publishing workflow to be in the game – if one key component lacks support the JDF flow grinds to a halt.

Adobe have added JDF support to Acrobat, which is to some extent accessible from InDesign, but Quark has moved ahead of Adobe by building JDF support directly into the page layout application, independently from PDF. No doubt Adobe will follow suit in the next version of InDesign, expected early next year, so the issue is not so much who got there first. But having what is still the mostly widely-used page layout application in the world throw its support behind JDF is of key importance at this time when broad-based JDF adoption by the publishing industry is still in question.

Quark uses JDF also in its Job Jackets feature. A Quark Job Jackets file contains all of the rules and specifications necessary to describe a QuarkXPress project. A Quark Job Jackets file can include specifications for colors, style sheets, trapping, and color management as well as picture color space, format, and resolution. The file can also include information such as the page size, number of pages, and contact information for the people involved with a job. And the file can include rules that specify configurations for font sizes, line thicknesses, box backgrounds, and other project elements. Workgroups can obtain consistent output by using Quark Job Jackets to share specifications across workstations.

For me the most intriguing benefit of Quark Job Jackets is that it re-invents the concept of preflighting. Preflighting has always been a post-process step: create your file, and then find out where you screwed up. With Job Jackets users can ensure that a print job adheres to its specifications from the moment it’s created, and that it continues to adhere to those specifications all the way through the production process until it rolls off the press. I’ve long maintained that page designers would not be able to perfect their process until it was possible to prevent errors, rather than to correct them after the fact. I’m certain this approach will fast become the production norm.

It’s interesting to me that searching through Google News the day after the Quark 7.0 launch in New York, there’s nary a mention in the mainstream press. Neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal seem to have found it worthy of coverage. To me this reflects the new prevailing “wisdom”: Adobe has won the page-layout wars (and every other war for that matter), so Quark’s announcement isn’t newsworthy. I think they are underestimating the importance of QuarkXPress 7.0. Only time will tell.