A quick tour of multimedia consultancies will rapidly confirm that a creative chasm still exists between the internet and CD-ROM. As a platform for delivering multimedia content the web is still disappointingly restrictive. A sales pitch CD-ROM recently put together by one content house for sports manufacturer Nike expresses this well. Video, audio and textual information are all bundled together with impressive logic to create an immersive Nike experience. Customers or retailers being persuaded to buy their latest range will be awed by the experience but by the same token will have come to expect nothing less from the great Nike marketing machine. The company’s web site, on the other hand, appears flat. As sites go Nike’s is great, there is interaction, logic, color, a bit of animation but without video, sound and 3D graphics it doesn’t touch the immersive experience of the CD-ROM. Thankfully one company out there is almost entirely focused on addressing these issues – Macromedia Inc. Say what you like about the ups and downs of this fourteen year old, loss making, San Francisco based firm, it has done more for multimedia content on the web in the last year than anyone in the industry. We’re not talking video and audio extraordinaire, just plain thinking easy-to-use bits of software that have speeded up the often painful job of making web sites more exciting. A decade ago Macromedia (then called Macromind) was championed for multimedia technology that enhanced the personal computer with sound and animation. Since then it has churned through a succession of CEO’s and strategy U-turns soaring to brief but dizzying success in the mid-nineties only to drop like a stone again along with a collapsing CD-ROM market. Fiscal 1997 has not been a good year for the self acclaimed Multimedia Kings. Acquisitions driven by a stubborn desire to take on Adobe Photoshop and achieve Microsoft like success in the graphics market strained the company’s finances.
Redefining the market
Meanwhile, the company missed the boat with its traditional content authoring tools business focusing too heavily on CD-ROM at a time when the web was redefining the market. Sales dropped 8 percent in fiscal 1997 and earnings shrunk from $23m to a loss of nearly $6m. The company’s share price crashed as well, from a high of $60 in 1995 to $10 in October 1997. To make things worse the outfit was clouted last summer with a class action law suit accusing the management of misrepresenting financial statements in December 1996 and also of fraud and insider trading. A sorry story, but despite all this the company has begun to make some impressive strides product wise, especially in the last year. Rob Burgess the company’s fifth and latest CEO has refocused Macromedia round a clear mission statement – to offer software that will make the web more compelling. An ambitious goal for a man who believes the web to be shitty gray and static but one he is well on the way to achieving. Burgess joined the company from Silicon Graphics Inc in the summer of 1996. He already had experience of engineering a massive turnaround at Canadian software house Alias Research (eventually acquired by SGI) and immediately began re-centering the company round its traditional authoring strengths. In the last year and a half he has restructured the business into four new operating divisions: internet and multimedia authoring; graphics; learning products; and video. His aim is to offer write once play anywhere software that will allow developers to create content that can be distributed on CD-ROMS, the web and on browsers. But more importantly he wants to create software that can be intelligently distributed based on how users are accessing content – whether they are getting it through high bandwidth CD-ROM technology or lower bandwidth web technologies.
Funky multimedia content
Such a goal ought to free developers up allowing them to create funky multimedia content for high end consumption but at the same time guarantee that lower bandwidth users will get an experience that is worth having. According to Kevin Lynch vice president for internet authoring at Macromedia the imminent onslaught of technologies like ADSL means that the top end of the web market is about to explode but there will continue to be a wide disparity of bandwidth, he says. 14.4k and 28.8k modems will be around for some time to come and we’ve got to use the lowest common denominator, he said. The company’s new tools said Lynch, offer a back off strategy that is completely transparent to users. If good bandwidth exists then users can get a plug in and enjoy the best experience but if there is less bandwidth the software will back off to give similar content using a Java applet, or back off still further to offer an animated giff or still further to offer a static giff. According to Lynch, of Macromedia’s four business divisions multimedia authoring and graphics currently bring in over 90 percent of total revenues. In multimedia authoring which accounts for 60 to 70 percent of total revenue the company has made massive strides in the last year introducing Flash 2.0 Director 6.0 and most recently its DreamWeaver authoring tool. Flash 2.0 launched last May has been a real hit with the content world. A direct result of Macromedia’s December 96 acquisition of FutureWave Software the product has been snapped up by professional and amateur web site designers eager to deliver fast interactive animations, buttons, graphics and sound over modem connections. Because it is vector based rather than bit-mapped the product uses up very little bandwidth. For Macromedia it has resurrected the power of its bandwidth hungry plug-in ShockWave bringing the benefits of ShockWave to the web in a smaller more powerful package. Another interesting aspect of Flash is its ability to work with real media streaming technology the result of a tie up between Macromedia and Real Networks (formerly Progressive) last October. By synchronizing animation (Real Flash) with real time audio in a Real system 5.0 streaming media player people like the entertainment house Warner Brothers can play cartoons over a modem. We obtained the Flash code base at the cusp of when CPU power had grown enough to transmit it said Lynch. It is the only vector based product of its kind on the market and our aim is to establish it as a vector format. Next to Director 6.0 – Macromedia’s core multimedia authoring tool focused on delivering whizzy content with support for both Flash and ShockWave – Macromedia’s second most powerful weapon has got to be DreamWeaver. Launched late last year, DreamWeaver is a visual web editing product aimed at internet professionals. It promises to speed up the laborious chore of writing HTML and dynamic HTML making it easier to maintain and make changes to larger sites. Users of the product are able to see the changes they are making on a web site while still maintaining full text control of the HTML.
Gimmicky products
According to Lynch, the plan is to further integrate the product with database technology so that one change made at database level will fire changes across all necessary web pages. In the coming year enhancements are planned for all three of the internet multimedia authoring tool products Flash, DreamWeaver and Director. Gimmicky products like the recently released SmartShock are also on the cards. SmartShock is aimed at making the download of plug-ins more intuitive by giving feed back to the user while the plug in is downloading. On the graphics side, Macromedia’s Freehand will also be revamped this year. It will continue to compete with Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator both on the Mac and Windows. The companies learning division sells one main product, PathWare (used to be AuthorWare). Unlike Macromedia’s graphics and internet technology which is shrink- wrapped PathWare is sold direct by a resource hungry direct sales team. The product accounts for only about ten percent of Macromedia’s revenue and it is tempting to question why the company persists with such an expensive side of the business. According to Lynch, opportunities on this side of the business however, are huge. Tens of thousands of employees at places like Boeing need to be trained to a certain level by law. PathWare with its built in grading system can provide remote face to face relationships for these people, he said. The company’s fourth division, video, doesn’t ship a product at present but has one in development According to Macromedia it is a very aggressive set of functional non linear editing tools designed to compete at a much lower price point with high end products like Avid. The product has been promised for some time but is likely to be launched finally this year. Macromedia’s most recent results for the third quarter of fiscal 97 were mixed. They showed third quarter operating profit of $407,000 or a penny a share, considerably better than analysts expected losses of 6 cents a share. But there was still an overall net loss of $7.2m compared with a loss of $2.3m the same quarter a year ago. Norman Meyrowitz chief technical officer for Macromedia speaking at the Macromedia European user conference in London last week said the company would continue to focus on generating top-line revenue growth through the introduction of new products and services as it transforms into a web-centric company. CD-ROMs he went on to say can offer fast good quality video and audio but as a medium are inflexible the web, on the otherhand is slow but highly pervasive we are trying to make the best out of both worlds, he said. Certainly the internet has proved a positive force in that it has forced developers to step back take a look at what customers want, what can feasibly be delivered and what business benefit can be derived. But it has also become a frustrating medium. Developers are losing patience with its speed, its restrictions and its flatness. Many a time they have to switch from implementing the whizziest graphics technology on CD-ROM where the end result surpasses even what they thought possible to the more restrictive job of making something work on the web. The novelty of displaying a small spinning animation on a web site is wearing off not just for developers but for end users as well. Clearly Macromedia isn’t out of the woods yet. But surely any outfit focused on making the web a more compelling place must be worth its weight in gold. á
