Introduction

Last week’s Seybold San Francisco, dubbed by the organizers a “global event” of the publishing industry, proved to a very interesting experience, albeit for all the wrong reasons. Events such as this, supposed to be one of the industry’s biggest and most influential, are generally a good occasion to get in touch with what is going on in a specific market place, and, given the rich and convoluted nature of professional publishing (in the larger sense of the term) one would assume that some things are happening even in rather dour times.

Usually the Seybold Conference manages to congregate a fair number of bright minds and industry pundits to convey a sense of scope and direction of the latest trends to the attending professionals. If you do not get a general overview at events such as this, where would you get it?

However, after last weeks conference, there could only be three rather disturbing conclusions: a) publishing is henceforth reduced to content and customer management. b) there is no more room for increasing excellence and creativity and c) the publishing market at large is so mature that there is nothing exciting left to develop.

Now don’t get me wrong: I know how important content management tools are to some parts of the industry, and it is quite true that this field has remained so complex that there is a lot to be done in streamlining the process. It is also clear that while XML is definitely a promising path for the publishing industry in some respects, it is also still quite hard to reach for most of the smaller organizations, let alone creative professionals. Yet I fail to see why these undisputable facts are so representative of a rather large industry which by and large survives by selling atoms rather than bytes.

Wither Excellence?

What bothers me in this picture is what looks like the disappearance of excellence. Design and Publishing are extremely competitive fields, where creativity and excellence are the factors which determine who is market leader, and who plays follow-up. To my best knowledge, neither of the aforementioned qualities can be automated yet, and if the players in this market lose sight of excellence and creativity, I would say it is fair to assume that they are also losing their grip of the market. Which leads me to the next point.

All dressed up and nothing left to develop?

The most disturbing feeling at last week’s Seybold, however, was the overwhelming impression that there is basically nothing left to be developed. We all now have agreed on most of the generic tools for producing images and designs, and if it weren’t for Adobe InDesign 2.0, you’d think all has been said and done in terms of design and publishing software. (Even the rumored QuarkXPress 6.0 which should be out “real soon now” is mostly driven by Quark’s need for a MacOS X-native solution, rather than a burning desire to innovate.)

I am personally stunned by this impression: here we are in a market which is utterly excellence-driven, a market which has to deal with excruciatingly complex technical requirements and workflow situation, and which for a large part depends on the individual user and his or her creativity to be better, faster and more ingenious than the competition - and there is NOTHING LEFT TO DEVELOP to help them in this process?

I find that hard to swallow: there is a new operating system in the market which shows that on that particular level, a lot can still be invented (OK, MacOS X had some rough edges left for design and publishing professionals, but most of them are gone with release 10.2). There are new graphic capabilities out there (don’t tell me transparency doesn’t count) and there is a world of new typographic possibilities linked to OpenType which is still largely untapped.

And these are only examples linked to graphics capabilities. There’s a lot of potential linked to every aspect of the design and publishing workflow. The application landscape may be more or less stabilized, but if anybody told me that we have reached the height of efficiency in getting our job done, it would make me want to sob convulsively.

Fundamental Shifts

In fact it is in situations like today that the true innovators can show what they are capable of. Whenever a market has been as quiet as the design and publishing industry has been for the past few years, there are the makings of profound evolutions. Of course we need to revise our expectations. Innovation is about taking risks, not about filling in the blanks.

It is about answering needs which have not yet become completely apparent - but which resonate strongly in most people once they are confronted with it. It is about being ahead of the game. In some situations it is difficult to truly innovate: when the dot-com frenzy was at its height, everybody was convinced that this was the only possible form of innovation, and getting attention for anything else than yet another pie-in-the-sky website would have been difficult.

But today is different. In a level playing field like the current design and publishing market, the situation has profoundly changed: there is ample room for improving what professionals do and how they do it - provided we understand what the genuine emerging needs are. There is no better starting point for the next push of innovation than a market which has become tired and blasé about the tools it is using.

But that also means taking risks. When Apple launched the world’s first PostScript laser printer, it made an enormous gamble. Nobody needed such a device - or let’s say nobody was aware of the need. Yet the first LaserWriter was probably one of the most revolutionary pieces of equipment this industry has seen in the past 20 years.

Today, we are getting ready for the next wave of innovation. It may take a bit of time, and it may not happen where you expect it, but the basic situation is here. All it takes now is to “think outside of the box” once again….

September 16, 2002

©2002 Pfeiffer Consulting