The following material appeared in the first issue of the fourth volume of the Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, September 20, 1989.
Making Sense Of the Revolution: A Seybold Manifesto
We are fond of saying that the computer publishing industry is in the midst of a revolution and that revolutions are generally pretty messy. Not surprisingly, an awful lot of what is happening in the industry these days is chaotic and confusing. This is exactly what makes it such an exciting time. Everything is changing at once. Everything is so interrelated. So many of the decisions that shape the future hinge not on technical issues but on personalities, egos, competing commercial interests and happenstance. Just when you think something is settled, along comes something new that changes the picture completely.
Despite this changing picture, we think that there are clear and consistent underlying trends. Most of the time, we deal with them almost on a subconscious level. The shared, half-articulated understanding about key market realities is part of the "world view'' that is reflected in our comments, observations and analyses of events.
Once in a while, it is useful to drag some of these assumptions out into the light of day for everyone to see. It helps us, our readers and our conference attendees to be clear about what we think is happening. We hope that it will also help you to articulate your own assumptions and to identify where your views differ from ours.
To make things manageable, we have stated some of our assumptions and beliefs in the form of ten premises. The number is completely arbitrary. There are at least a half dozen more that come to mind, but we had to stop someplace. The sequence is also somewhat arbitrary. There is no implication, therefore, that Premise #2 is more important than Premises #4 or #8.
None of these premises is likely to seem new or startling to regular readers of this Report. After all, the whole point of the exercise is to re-articulate assumptions that have been there all along. Nevertheless, when you set out to state some of your assumptions as bald premises, interesting implications pop out.
Here are our premises. See what you think.
1. Information in electronic form
We are well on our way along an evolution into an entirely new environment: one in which gathering, organizing, analyzing, formatting, presenting and communicating information between and among the individuals and organizations involved in the publishing process is done electronically. This is an absolutely fundamental shift that has very far-reaching implications.
Electronic distribution.One of the implications, of course, is that putting marks on paper is only one way of ``publishing''--making public--the information that is stored in the computer. Depending on the requirements, information may be published on paper. It may be presented on slides or on a video screen. It may be published in an interactive database stored in a computer or distributed on CD-ROMs. It may include not only text, graphics and still images, but also sound, animation and motion images. It may be accessed via a variety of means, including through interactive hypermedia links on a computer database or through an "agent'' program that analyzes information for the user and selects the documents or portions of documents that it has been taught are likely to be of interest.
Documents may be published in several forms. Even those that are primarily paper-based may also be available in alternative forms. The material that is now prepared for a printed mail order catalog might be stored online (so that order-takers or stock clerks can call up and view the same catalog page the customer sees). The printed catalog could also be supplemented by a CD-ROM version with voice descriptions, visual effects, electronic order forms and dial-up order fulfillment.
We believe that paper will remain the preferred method of distributing information for a long time. Paper documents are inexpensive, compact and portable, can render high-quality images, and are easy to access or peruse in a non-sequential fashion. However, in general, even for documents distributed exclusively on paper, the objective will be to prepare the document within the computer systems and convert it onto paper as late in the process as possible, and as close to the user as possible. The ideal delivery vehicle for the Seybold Reports, for example, would probably be ultra-high-resolution facsimile delivered directly to our subscribers' offices--or, perhaps even better, a high-resolution screen display with the option of high-quality output on paper at the reader's discretion.
Already, magazine and newspaper publishers are making increased use of remote printing plants so that they can image the publication on paper as close to the reader as practical and so that they can tailor the publication as closely as possible to the reader's interest. Other publishers are using printing and binding facilities that permit a high degree of demographic tailoring in assembling the publication.
Electronic communication.None of this is news to most people in the publishing industry. But what many fewer people have focused on is the really fundamental change taking place "upstream'' of the distribution process.
Simply put, the communication of information between individuals and between organizations involved in the publishing process will increasingly occur in electronic form. Writers and illustrators submit text and graphics for a company newsletter in electronic form. Authors submit book manuscripts in electronic form. Advertisers will want to submit completed ads to newspapers and magazines in press-and format-independent electronic form. Under the CALS (Computer-aided Acquisition and Logistic Support) initiative, Department of Defense contractors will submit documentation in electronic form rather than on paper.
An ever-larger proportion of this exchange of information will take place between departments and between organizations: between graphic designers and prepress production houses, between magazine or catalog publishers and their printers, between subcontractors and prime contractors, between advertisers and publishers.
All of this means that the publishing process is increasingly rooted in electronic information processing, and that publishers are increasingly dependent upon tools, techniques and standards developed by the computer industry.
2. The desktop market drives standards
Cal Bauer of Bauer Enterprises (now a part of Microsoft) caused a furor when he stated at the Seybold Seminars last March that publishing standards are driven from the desktop market. A number of the attendees took the trouble to tell us that it was the dumbest comment they had ever heard. We told them that we largely agreed with Bauer's statement.
The real question is: Who has the power to set standards? The answer, we believe, is that it is the people who ship lots of product. Desktop computers, desktop networks and laser printers constitute the sea that even high-end publishing applications must swim in. Like it or not, the important standards are set by the environment. The computer operating environments, networking capabilities, page description languages and font technologies that we discuss in these conferences are fundamental technology for the next generation of publishing.
3. Heterogeneous computing environments
This brings us to our next point: it is going to be increasingly rare, we believe, for publishing to take place within a single, homogeneous computing environment. There will probably always be all-Macintosh shops, all-IBM shops, all-DEC shops, etc., but the trend is clearly away from this direction.
More and more, the reality for users is a mixed Mac/PC/ Unix installed base. This likelihood becomes almost a certainty when you start worrying about communicating information between different organizations. In most situations, it is impractical to assume that everyone involved in the publishing process is using the same kind of computer.
Naturally, this means that users want and need the ability to exchange information among all these computers. But as we progress, we may no longer be talking about passing simple ASCII text files. We will want to exchange 3D rendered images, charts and graphs that include rotated text, formatted pages of text and graphics, and full-color, high-resolution images. We may simply want to drive the same output device from a variety of computers.
This evolution poses a real dilemma. The computing industry has finally begun to build into its products the kind of sophistication required for publishing (see point #6, below). Developers are struggling to integrate the required facilities into their respective operating environments. To what extent will insisting on portability of information among computer systems force us back to much more primitive, "least common denominator'' standards?
4. Control by the 'originator'
Until recently, publishing technology had forced a clear separation between the creative people who specified work and the craft specialist who implemented these specifications. This separation produces a convoluted, time-consuming and expensive process. The creative person, or "originator,'' specifies what is to be done; the craftsperson, using special equipment, carries out the orders. The craftsperson may make mistakes, or the originator may decide after seeing the results that he or she does not like them. A cycle of proofs and corrections is born.
Now, increasingly, the originator deals directly with the computer system that implements (usually instantaneously) what he or she tells it to do. In the simplest case, a single person has complete responsibility for producing a document. More often, multiple people are involved. Publishing is usually a group or collective activity teaming people with different responsibilities and different areas of expertise: text creation, text editing, graphics, composition and page make-up, and so forth.
The new technology enables each person or group to take direct control of his, her or its portions of the overall task. We can (and should) rethink the entire publishing process and restructure it to take best advantage of the opportunities opened up by this new technology. We must develop new organizational structures and relationships. Who should do what? Who has the skills, the experience and the tools required to perform a given task? Is the best use of a creative person's time to have him or her making craft decisions? How should people communicate?
We also need new computer-based tools for managing the publishing process. This is clearly the most significant unmet need in desktop publishing systems.
5. Rich graphic communication
This point probably does not need much elaboration. In general, we think it is clear that, across the board, as better tools become available, more people are using more graphics to communicate information. This observation extends to dramatic increases in the use of type and typography, graphics and graphic effects, and, of course, color.
We see no sign that this trend is abating, or that it is a fad. In fact, looking at what we can anticipate in the way of new tools and capabilities in the coming years, we think that we are still in the early stages of this phenomenon. Since the tools will be so widely available, the increased freedom will almost certainly bring the expected proportion of aesthetic travesties.
6. 'Publishing' inseparable from 'computing'
We have already contended that (depending upon your application) publishing either has become or is becoming completely rooted in electronic information processing. But the converse is also happening.
As the computer industry evolves from its data processing roots towards a focus on gathering, organizing, analyzing, formatting and communicating information, it homes in on performing exactly the same tasks we said (in item #1, above) that publishers do.
"Office'' vs. "publishing.''One by one, the major computer companies have come to realize that "publishing'' and "office'' users do not belong to two different markets, but actually represent different points along a single continuum. We treated them as separate markets in the past because the technology forced us to. Users had a choice: professionally typeset documents that communicated information more effectively and more authoritatively (at the expense of long turnaround times, loss of control and high cost), or low-quality typewritten documents produced in the office (low cost, fast turnaround and control at the expense of effective communication, authority and prestige). But if you look at the world from the standpoint of user needs, it is clear that this distinction is entirely artificial. In reality, the documents people would like to produce span a wide range from simple office memos to the most demanding printed material.
With today's technology, the office user and the publishing user represent different points along this continuum. Increasingly, they use the same computers. They may, at different times, be the same person. They will frequently need to exchange information. More important, as technology opens up new possibilities, the office user's expectations are shooting upward. Word processor and spreadsheet users are demanding access to a variety of type fonts and sizes and increasingly sophisticated graphics for the same reasons that publishers have demanded them: they help communicate information more effectively.
The office user probably does not know what goes into producing professional-looking pages, but he has been looking at them all his life, and he knows quality when he sees it. He will not be satisfied for long with a spreadsheet heading set in 48-point Helvetica with excessive letterspacing. He may prefer Palatino, he will certainly prefer to see it properly kerned, and he will definitely want access to a rich set of characters and symbols.
Leading-edge application.In short, the computer industry is coming to realize that publishers no longer represent a special case. "Publishers'' are the professional communicators. They are the ones pushing the computing envelope. What they want now, the rest of the market will expect in a few years.
So publishing becomes the test case. Publishers are also the early adopters, and therefore they are a key market for the latest computer technology. Less demanding office users may not know why they need the latest, most powerful graphic computer. Users at the publishing end of the spectrum generally have no such questions. They are ready and eager for as much power and sophistication as they can get.
7. Democratization of publishing
One of the key ingredients in the revolution is, of course, broad distribution of the new generation of hardware and software. This distribution has made tools available to everyone from casual user to full-time professional, from a South African dissident on a shoestring budget to the creative director of an advertising agency.
Moreover, an extraordinary number of these people are using the same tools. The same desktop publishing program used to produce the departmental newsletter might also be used to lay out pages, compose text and size and place pictures for a high-quality color catalog.
Three key elements have created this phenomenon:
Low cost. Mass-market pricing for hardware and software has made publishing solutions affordable. This is important not just for the small entrepreneur on a tiny budget, but also for a workgroup or department within a large organization. Inexpensive solutions do not require the kind of rigid cost-justification needed for the previous generation of publishing systems.
Availability. Almost as important as low prices is wide availability. PCs and Macs are available through computer dealers in even the smallest cities. Unix workstations are sold through more specialized channels, but they still have far broader and more diverse distribution than did the previous generation of dedicated publishing systems.
Accessibility. Some 18 years ago, the Compugraphic CompuWriter ushered in an era of low-cost (under $10,000) typesetting systems. These substantially broadened the typesetting market, but they did not have anything like the impact of the more recent desktop publishing systems.
There are two reasons for this smaller impact. The first is that the CompuWriter et al. were typesetting systems: they produced galleys of type, not complete pages. Second--and far more important--these machines were intended for use by a specially trained craftsperson. They required a thorough knowledge of typesetting commands and conventions as well as equipment to process the photographic paper exposed in the typesetting machine.
By contrast, one of the key aspects of the successful desktop publishing products is that they made publishing available to a much wider audience.
The virtue of this accessibility is now apparent to everyone. If your objective is to give the originator control of the process, you had better build a product that is simple enough that he or she is willing to learn to use it.
Naturally, there is tension between the continual pressure to add capability and sophistication to products and the desire to keep them accessible enough to have broad appeal.
8. Building and supporting systems
If you think about it, the situation we have described thus far creates a few nasty problems. We have described a world dominated by mass-market hardware and software that, to be successful in the market, must appeal to large numbers of potential users. But professional users large and small may need more.
They may need more capabilities or more sophistication than can be reconciled with the "accessibility'' demanded by the mass market. They may need higher throughput and/or better quality. They may need to integrate more types of information from a greater variety of sources. They will almost certainly need tools to manage and control the publishing process.
In short, at some point you must assemble a publishing system. This may be a matter of networking computers and selecting a suite of software packages. But it may involve considerably more. It may make sense to add software that is better suited to the task at hand. You may even want specialized hardware that offers substantial performance or productivity advantages.
Who builds the system?Most small users, and a small but increasing number of medium to large users, are tackling the system integration task themselves. Some prefer to have this control. Others feel they have no choice. But it is clear that a great number of users do not want to be in the system integration business. They would rather have someone else build the system for them.
The dilemma is that system integration is a lot more difficult--and a lot more expensive--than many users appreciate. The applications that attract system developers tend to be those in which there are a sizable number of (preferably large) users who share similar application needs, and who regard a publishing system as so important to their business that they are willing to pay whatever it takes to get one.
This situation describes such users as large newspapers and magazines, color trade shops and color printers, and documentation users who face stringent requirements (such as the need for CALS compliance). It does not describe many smaller users, or users who, the vendors fear, can probably assemble what they need from pieces they can buy from the local computer store and who are not willing to pay a substantial premium to have this done for them.
As we have been pointing out repeatedly for the past four or five years, we think that the computer industry's biggest challenge is figuring out how to deliver application solutions to customers who want them. We are not certain anyone has really figured this out yet.
We ourselves have the sneaking suspicion that the answer, such as it is, may lie not with any single course of action, but rather with the cumulative effect of a lot of partial answers: carefully crafted operating environments that support "plug and play'' system configuration, rigorously consistent graphic user interfaces, a great deal of attention paid by application software developers to logical consistency and ease of operation, extensive use of standards that allow programs to work together and to exchange data in a transparent fashion, online "help'' and support facilities, a growing support infrastructure that includes vendor hotlines, formal and informal user groups, books, magazines, training classes, consultants, and buddy-to-buddy assistance, and small and large system integrators and value-added dealers who focus on understanding and serving particular applications.
9. A digital world
The electronic communication we talked about back in Premise #1 is made possible by the fact that we are increasingly able to convert information into digital form that can be stored and manipulated on a computer. We all know about text, graphics and images. Sound has also moved into the digital world (samplers, synthesizers, compact discs and digital audio tapes). Animation and video are now moving in the same direction. Taste, smell and tactile sensations have yet to be conquered.
This does not mean that it always makes economic sense to put something into digital form--ask someone who just spent 40 minutes playing out on a Linotronic a halftone that he could have stripped into place on the page for $10. However, we are all aware that the economic thresholds are being lowered month by month, year by year. (See, for example, the report on the EFI compression scheme for color images on page 27 of this issue.)
Multimedia collision.One of the consequences of this movement is an inevitable collision between the computer/ publishing world and the audio/video entertainment world. We have already suggested that documents may include digitized sound and motion video. Where will the lines be drawn? Are not sound and video effective new ways of communicating information that should be used when appropriate?
We think so.
10. Foundation for the future
We believe that the computer/publishing industry is now going through a period of dramatic change. We are nearing the end of the PC era and establishing the foundation for a new generation of computing based on powerful desktop computers, sophisticated multitasking operating systems, networking, graphic operating environments, interoperability among application programs, and rich use of text, graphics, images and sound.
It is in this period of transition from one generation to the next that the shape of the next generation is established. The major companies are battling fiercely to determine who will drive the market. The decisions being made now and the market positions being established now will be hard to change in the years to come--which is precisely why these decisions are so important to all of us.
As we said at the outset, this is what makes these "the best of times and the worst of times'' for all of us caught up in the revolution.
Jonathan Seybold
