Well… as is the world begins to sober to the reality that economic times are likely to get worse before they improve, nearly every aspect of print production is beginning to look at ways to save money in the costs of the process. Traditionally, we have looked at the process of print production itself as the only real means with which to streamline production, but we are reaching a near optimal use of time and resources… diminishing returns are on the horizon in the abilities of print production to cut too many more appreciable costs
The print service provider has long been at the mercy of the creative whom begins the process, and ultimately feeds the eventual print-production workflow. Creative professionals have long been tempted by the latest and greatest features and abilities that may ultimately have caused those of us in the print production community a great deal of difficulty. I think we have reached feature and complexity saturation.
I visit creative professionals in my travels, and make observations as to how they are working, and what features of the applications they use. I am seeing that people stick to the core-features of the tools they use. Sure, every designer loves drop-shadows, clipping-paths, and varnish-masks etc., but in reality, they spend 99 per cent of their time doing core design and layout work. While they may ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ about amazing features like website/flash-export features and the like, they need to get last weeks’ newsletter out first. The current versions of applications that are installed on most of these users are fully adequate to get those core-function roles done, and the compelling reasons to look at the upgrade begin to pale.
As this lethal combination of complex menus and abilities, with an already incredible feature-set, is faced with a global economic crisis and the needs of the user to cut costs will make times difficult for the software developers of our industry. The question is being asked with ever more insistence, “Do we really need to buy the latest upgrades for everyone?” The software industry plans for at least an 18 month product-cycle, and something like the current economic slowdown will begin to hit the companies that have already spent several years of development to bring new versions of their applications to market. A market that due to reasons beyond the developers’ control, may not be willing or able to purchase those products or upgrades. As a result, developers are beginning to see the numbers of upgrade purchases declining, and are beginning the largest wave of layoffs in recent memory. Adobe recently terminated 600 employees attributing weak sales of Creative Suite 4 as the main reason. This is a major news story that is really not getting the attention of the graphics community like it perhaps should. A company like Adobe losing nearly 10 per cent of its global workforce is a true canary in the coal-mine to the software development community, but it may be more applicable to the larger developers than the smaller ones. Most smaller developers exist because their tools are well-suited to a solution that they are nearly indispensible. These developers are likely better-prepared to weather the storm because their user-base will need their tools in as much as there is little or no true competition.
The end result of this current and impending global pragmatism is that people will use the tools that they currently have, until either a compelling reason to upgrade is implemented by the development community, or until things improve in the global economy. Regardless, people historically go back to their core-basics in times of unsure economic status, and that is obviously happening to our industry. We in print production are at the end of the content-creation food chain, and will likely begin to see the shakeout of this by not seeing the percentage of jobs entering the shop with the latest and greatest applications. I have often seen a designer have to make concessions to their “portfolio piece” of a design job once faced with the budget from the printery. “Well, maybe I don’t really need four UV coatings and matte varnishes.” That same “being faced with the reality” of a major software upgrade costing $700 or more, may bring new pragmatism to the creatives as well in our industry, and may well bring up the justification of “CS3 is good enough at meeting my needs today.” Times will be lean, and we will definitely see it in the types of job we get from content creators. We really do currently employ enough capabilities in our software tools to get work done, and they are already too complex. I think the world is going back to basics, and I think the software that drives and feeds print is no exception.
