Writing for Publish.com, Matt Hicks provides a very good update on SVG support in the browser, putting in perspective recent announcements about SVG support in upcoming versions of Opera and Mozilla Firefox.
Category: Publishing & media (Page 51 of 53)
I’m way behind in planned blog entries from last week’s conference, but this has jumped to the top of the queue. Rather than repeat points made by others I’ll point you to Thad’s post, and a couple of other postings and focus on a point I haven’t seen made yet. Brice and others made the clear point that application redundancy means death for certain products. I also share Tim’s skepticism of Flash. But while every analyst under the Sun will talk about what this means to Microsoft, there is an aspect of this that needs more attention.
Whatever the combined suite of Adobe and Macromedia apps ends up looking like, it will be a mammoth suite with a combination of document and web capabilities that will compete with Microsoft Office, which will also have a combination of document and web capabilities. The real competition won’t be immediate because the difference between creative and knowledge worker tools is still pretty wide, and it won’t be complete because there will always be a need for a difference. However, over time the differences will be managed more by configuration of functions than by buying separate applications.
Thinking about a future dominated by these huge suites you can’t help but think “What’s the alternative?”. Many of us author less and less in big powerful applications, and more with simple editing tools (email, blogs, HTML forms, Notepad etc.). There are two reasons for this. One is that “fast and easy” is critical for efficient communication and we naturally gravitate to it. Second, none of the authoring tools available today have succeeded in allowing us to easily author once for both documents and web pages. The big feature-heavy suites are good to have around, but we also need new authoring tools that are light, flexible and create content that is marked-up just enough to easily share with applications, whether office or web suites, or enterprise applications.
How did we become sheep? In fact eunuched sheep? Why is anyone pretending that the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe has anything to do with the customers of either company? This is a deal only for the management and shareholders of Adobe and Macromedia. Anyone who pretends otherwise is a fool. Graphic designers and webmasters should be greeting this with the same enthusiasm that Buckingham Palace received the news of Prince Charles and Camilla.
Adobe is famous for making acquisitions that could be funded from the expense accounts of its senior executives. Most amount to spare change (and have a similar impact on Adobe’s corporate fortunes). Adobe’s last big purchases were Aldus and FrameMaker, both in the mid-90s. As far as I can tell PageMaker is the only extant product remaining from Adobe’s purchase of Aldus, and it’s on life support. A year ago Adobe made it clear to PageMaker users to upgrade to InDesign pronto, or face product upgrade and customer support hell. Adobe continues to pretend that FrameMaker is a going concern, but it’s an ill-kept secret in the industry that the next version of InDesign will be announced at FrameMaker’s graveside.
What’s the win for either company’s customers? Better products? Better customer service? More innovation? Give me a break! These are two great companies, leaders in their field both in terms of innovation and customer service. But they are competitors. And in the dog-eat-dog world that we call “capitalism,” the larger dog eats the Chihuahua for lunch, and we all call it “synergy.”
In today’s CNET we were offered the kind of analyst’s quote that passes for informed critique:
“Consolidation in the industry is not always the best thing,” said Bruce Heavin, co-founder of Lynda.com. “I’ve always seen Macromedia and Adobe get better when they were on each other’s heels. When Adobe had LiveMotion, I saw better things coming out of Flash. And GoLive has helped Dreamweaver progress.”
That said, Heavin said the acquisition could improve compatibility between products.
“I think it will make it easy for these programs to talk to each other,” Heavin said. “It could wind up making it easier for the customers and the users… In the end I think this will be somewhat (emphasis mine) of a good thing.”
I’d never heard of lynda.com before today. An authoritative expert, no doubt — the site helps “media designers & communicators understand how to use professional tools and design to enhance visual communication through web, print, and motion graphics.”
My first reaction to today’s news was “where are they going to dump FreeHand?” You may recall that Adobe ended up with FreeHand once before, after acquiring Aldus in 1994. Legal action by Altsys, FreeHand’s developer, and some semblance of a Federal anti-trust department, forced Adobe to return all rights for FreeHand to Altsys. And then Altsys promptly sold itself to Macromedia.
Those of us more than 11-years-old recall that Altsys’ big product was not FreeHand but Fontographer (FreeHand may have generated more cash, but Fontographer was the product that put Altsys on the map). Fontographer was the first, and, as far as I know, remains the best product for creating digital fonts (OpenType fonts excepted). I’d long ago forgotten about it, but see tonight that it remains available, buried on Macromedia’s site. So Adobe got that in the bargain (let this serve as a reminder to Adobe management — they probably didn’t notice along the way!).
The official FAQ of the announcement is a model of corporate bafflegab:
“Why are the companies joining now?”
“Both companies are experiencing great success and momentum and have great opportunities ahead of them, and believe that together, they will be better able to achieve their combined vision with greater synergy. We also believe the joining of two healthy companies will lead to a more successful combined company.”
Wow! That certainly makes sense to me!
Analysts who are trying to be provocative are positioning the takeover as a stab against Microsoft. According to Monday’s Wall Street Journal:
“Microsoft already regards PDF’s success as a long-term threat. The next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn and due out next year, is expected to include features to move documents around companies and the Internet, and aimed at eliminating the need for PDF.
‘There’s a huge battle brewing’ between Adobe and Microsoft, said Andy Warzecha, senior vice president of Meta Group, a unit of technology-research firm Gartner Inc., in Stamford, Conn.'”
Zowie! That faux-battle is a subject for a separate critique. But tell me how does the acquisition of Macromedia make the least bit of difference in this “battle”? Adding Flash to PDF makes no sense whatsoever (though no doubt, some engineers will find the bandaids to do so). SVG was Adobe’s “Flash-killer.” It seemed like a joke at first, but has gained W3C endorsement (including endorsement from Macromedia). It’s a more complex format than Flash, and far less ubiquitous, but offers significant features that Flash doesn’t even reach for. On top of that, SVG is a direct descendent of PDF, and shares much of the code base. Flash is the bastard cousin of PDF.
As I think about the acquisition tonight, only two things are clear to me. First, Adobe needed to do something that would make headlines to justify its recently inflated share price and reputation. With its share prices suddenly inflated into the stratosphere Adobe could afford to make an all-stock deal for Macromedia (Macromedia shareholders take note: sell ASAP). Second, there’s no better time to make an obviously anti-competitive acquisition than during the reign of George Bush II.
As part of the conference next week, I will be doing a tutorial on XML and how it is currently used in content management applications. There is plenty to talk about. While there are few “pure” applications of XML content management, XML is used, in varying degrees, to manage and represent the content, the metadata, the supporting data, and the configuration data in many content management applications.
We will spend some time talking generally about how XML is used in content management applications. Much of the focus will be on a series of brief case studies–example applications really–discussing how successful projects use XML today.
XyEnterprise announced that its XML Professional Publisher (XPP) publishing software now integrates with Design Science’s MathFlow Editor. XPP is an XML-based publishing system used to produce scientific, technical and medical journals, as well as many other types of print and electronic publications. Combined with MathFlow’s graphical interface, which supports the creation of complex mathematical expressions, publishers of complex mathematical information now have a user-friendly publishing tool that supports the MathML standard. http://www.dessci.com,
The impact of the Internet on most things personal and professional could be the life’s work of many a sociologist. How we shop, play games, read newspapers and books, and even how we fall in love doesn’t escape redefinition and change. From my perspective, its how we communicate that’s one of the more interesting topics. Safe to say that 10, perhaps even 5 years ago, stating that “everyone’s a publisher” would be quizzical. Now, evidence abounds.
In terms of “social” publishing, blogs and wikis certainly top the list of examples. These days however, those who chat, shop or place a classified ad in a newspaper can also be called a social publisher. And that’s a lot of people.
Granted, the usability of online forms for these types of tasks is usually exceptional enough to hide this fact. But the underlying result immediately publishes opinions, product reviews, and ads to the broadest communication vehicle available today. Even better, the tools are intuitive, fast, cheap, in some cases, free.
In terms of “corporate” publishing, the once contained group of professionals who publish to the Internet is no more. Formalized content technologies allow personnel across most, if not all business units to redefine information creation and delivery — toward the goal of eradicating Web publishing bottlenecks.
The tools in this arena, a.k.a content management systems and according to IDC, “dynamic enterprise publishing products”, certainly don’t boast the same reputation as those for social publishing. In fact, evaluation criteria such as usability, speed and cost often contradicts the notion of “intuitive, fast, and cheap.”
Still, the content technologies software market continues to redefine corporate publishing and support the fact that indeed, “everyone’s a publisher.” And every so often, there’s a real grassroots example of the ever-expanding definition of corporate publishers who create and deliver Web content on a daily basis. From my perspective, Macromedia provides the most recent example.
Since introducing Contribute in December of 2002 for a mere $99, Macromedia has enjoyed consistently growing sales for the past 2 ½ years for this desktop Web content and creation tool. In fact, the company has shipped over 360,000+ seats in less than three years based on the mantra “Web Publishing for Everyone.”
According to the company, users from its business and consumer markets are responsible for the uptake, bolstering a 165% and 258% year-on-year revenue growth respectively. Christening its Web Publishing System in July 2004 with a similar mantra, Macromedia now boasts 250 enterprise customers according to its latest product update release. Both products are included in the company-defined “Information Convenience” category.
Certainly, reputation and marketing have helped Macromedia establish a formidable presence in the corporate publishing arena. A savvy partnership with eBay will surely make a mark in the social publishing arena by introducing Contribute to thousands of consumers.
It’s my opinion, however, that Macromedia’s growth numbers can also be attributed to the fact that everyone is, or at least wants to be, a publisher. And the Internet makes it possible.
Example: in the enterprise, the definition of “everyone” has morphed from the traditional publisher roles such as Webmaster or technical writer into the evolving responsibilities of business unit representatives across a wide spectrum. Borrowing from Field of Dreams, it’s pretty clear that “if you build it, they will come.” Yes, of course it depends how and what you build, not to mention how much it costs! The point is however, that the corporate publishing audience is ready and waiting.
As we reported in our news pages today, Socialtext has added functionality and repackaged their product line to appeal to a range of small to large enterprises. One of the things we are collecting in our survey on enterprise blog and wiki use is size of enterprises using them. We don’t have nearly enough data to say anything meaningful yet, but so far it is a fairly even spread based on company size. We’ll be keeping the survey open for awhile, and it is very short (5 multiple choice questions), so tell us what your organization is doing or planning with blog, wiki, and RSS technology.
There is some additional detail on what blogs and wikis don’t do for you from somone who is using them in an enterprise environment that Lauren interviewed for her report at Corporate Blogs and Wikis: Benefits and Limits.
It is to early to tell anything from our ongoing survey on the use of enterprise blogs, wikis and RSS, but so far it is surprising how low the use of RSS is. Speaking of RSS, there is a fairly new blog focused on enterprise RSS that looks worth tracking.
Both are good background reading for our upcoming conference session in San Francisco.
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