By: Erik Vlietinck
Fri, September 21, 2007 - 6:01:00

http://www.ifra.com

October is IFRA month. On October 8, all important players in the media industry will be present in Vienna. Desktop publishing and graphic design industry suppliers and service providers will do their best to convince the audience of the superiority of their products and services. This year, IFRA made me think about the evolution in publishing, how it has all grown to become cross-media and open, how integration between applications and workgroup collaboration are now the buzzwords, and how two of the industry giants will soon be fighting over the customer’s attention.

I couldn’t help think about the way Adobe has evolved and how Quark is re-inventing itself. Oh, and how so many names have disappeared: Macromedia, Aldus, ALAP… In short, I was thinking about how the industry changed into what it is today.

When Adobe started in 1982, it had only a couple of technologies: Postscript and somewhat later Photoshop. Both revolutionised the creative industries. While Quark was founded in 1981 --a year before Adobe-- its flagship product QuarkXPress only saw the light of day in 1987. Desktop publishing was in its infancy, and most publications were produced mechanically. QuarkXPress introduced precision typography, layout, and colour control to the desktop computer, and delivered those features to designers at a fraction of the cost of proprietary typesetting systems.

Quark grew over the years, but always remained a privately owned company, focussing on one type of activity: publishing. Adobe grew faster than Quark, mainly because it went public. It also diversified into many different types of activity, ranging from illustrations to document management and remote meeting management.

Adobe Launches InDesign

Today, Adobe is one of the biggest companies in the IT industry. Quark isn’t exactly small itself, but it’s nowhere as big as Adobe. The two were partners in the early years. Quark relied on Adobe technology --and still does today-- to deliver printing services to its users. As time went by, the two became fierce competitors. When Adobe took over Aldus Pagemaker, the companies became enemies in business, and when Quark started to take its customer base for granted, Adobe saw its chance and launched InDesign, which was to push QuarkXPress out of the market, mainly because of the many users f QuarkXPress who had enough of the company’s arrogance.

When Raymond Schiavone joined Quark in 2006, the days of arrogance were over. Quark has since launched new versions of QuarkXPress and has acquired a couple of other companies that have an established reputation and are important in the printing industry.

Adobe meanwhile has acquired the company that developed Golive, it acquired Macromedia, Aldus, and a whole bunch of other companies. Adobe’s strategy was to get as much grip on the cross-media and desktop publishing market as possible, while simultaneously developing Postscript into a document format that could be extended and hooked into at will (PDF).

With its growth, Adobe faced multiple challenges and not all of these have seen a smooth ride. Golive, for example, was the competitor of Dreamweaver for many years, until Adobe took over Macromedia and killed Golive development in favour of Dreamweaver. It was clear from the start that Golive could never compete with Dreamweaver, and when that also became clear to Adobe’s internal structures, they simply purchased the whole thing.

Integration Between Adobe Applications: Still Some Way to Go

Such an acquisition strategy creates monopolies on one hand, but on the other ensures that some of the best available technologies and products are in the hands of some of the best programmers in their category worldwide (e.g. Thomas Knoll). Adobe also chose to deliver integration between all the technologies and products it now actively develops and maintains.

Such integration is easier said than done. Take for example Creative Suite 3. Dreamweaver and Fireworks still look much like their Macromedia predecessors. There is little or no integration between these two applications and the rest of the suite, but even long-time parts of Creative Suite like Photoshop and Illustrator don’t integrate as tightly as you would expect them to.

If you create a colour swatch in Illustrator, you can import that swatch into Photoshop, but you’ll have to use Adobe’s swatch exchange format to do it. And the swatches themselves are not open for third-party products either. 

In the area of workgroup and document management support, Adobe has offered Version Cue and Bridge. Both programs performed more or less well in CS2, and have been vastly improved with CS3. But you can’t get around the fact that Version Cue is not intended for large workgroups --although the underlying database technology certainly is scalable enough.

The same goes for Adobe’s InDesign/InCopy collaboration tool, which is good for small workgroups of a couple of people. When you need collaboration with larger groups of co-workers, you’d better buy Smart Connection Enterprise or K4. If you look closer, you’ll therefore conclude that Adobe’s first concern has always been --and still is, up to a point-- to pamper the individual creative professional. Except for Adobe’s clearly “enterprise” labelled products and services, the products are aimed at individual designers.