So, a couple of weeks ago, I exchanged emails with a Kodak field that I knew from waaaaay back, like the 1990s. He was always field while I was always product development. Usually when we talked, that meant something had gone really wrong. Trust me, when things are running smoothly, the product guys and the field guys never talk.

Anyways, it went something like this:

He sends me an email "Look here Pilgrim..." and points to a funny Youtube video. I email him back asking if he is still working at Kodak and...

"Yes, I am part of the thin blue line that remains. For now.
I was telling someone the other day that it is actually kind of an adventure now. Like a computer game of survival. To see how long one can last as a functioning worker before one is fired, laid off, hired away, falls into a tragic downward spiral of drink and recreational drugs, or is driven past the point of endurance to an irreversible psychotic break. Last one standing supports the Prospero."

And I say:
"I have you in my dead pool for the month of March. I hope you don't take it personally."

Him:
"Certainly not! I welcome Death's final, icy embrace. But I must inquire how you calculate such odds"

Me:
"Easy. In the last week of February, I make a post that craps on Kodak management (again) and mention what a close personal friend you are.
In March, you get canned. Power of the press m'boy. Or in the case, behold the awesome power of the Prepress Pilgrim blog."

Last word to him:
"Hmph! I'm not going to be a sucker for a rigged game. It will never work. Kodak management knows perfectly well I have no friends. Besides, I am confident they would never be so petty and vindictive to a loyal worker who bears the red and gold badge embroidered upon his Made in China service uniform."

Hah, it was great talking to them. That's one of the things I miss, is shooting the breeze with the field guys. Pretty well all of them had a good sense of humor and enormous balls, especially the workflow specialists.

Anyhow, this brings (somehow the preamble above was a bridge, trust me on  this) to the matter at hand, Kodak's last quarter. Like no kidding, they made money. No matter how they made money, that's a nice achievement for a company that won the Motley Fool worst stock of 2010 contest. I mean,  I'm right there dumping on Kodak with all the other vultures, but people are saying its worse than Fannie Mae?

There's lots of buzz saying that too much of the profit is coming from patent licensing deals and if you put that aside, there's really no growth in revenue. This is really bad, according to those financial experts with the shiny shoes and the fancy degrees who have really shown John Q. Public how clever they are in the  last few years, what with the financial crisis and all.

On the other hand, you know, if you actually own Kodak stock, it's nice to know that Samsung is paying Kodak $450 million in licensing revenue this year. Nice work if you can get it, and kudos to the Kodak suit that got that deal signed. Hey, if I ever called you guys a bunch of pinheads, I take it back.

So far, the stock has bounced back to $6, and the Motley Fool grumps have sarcastically noted that's the same price that it was 40 years ago. Sure it is, but Kodak paid dividends up until this year, and why don't you get the list of the Fortune 100 companies from 40 years ago, and tell me today how many of those guys are even in business?

Kodak's been trying to go digital since Clinton's first term, and the jury is getting awfully hungry and wants to get this over with and go home to see the kiddies. Honestly, some people just want Kodak to go bankrupt just to see the end of the drama show.  But unless the forecasting is waay off, it looks like we're gonna see Perez at the end of the year, taking shots from the analysts all over again.

Looks like I'm going to do lousy in my dead pool this spring. But hey, wait until autumn.

Insane traffic over at Tech Crunch which is covering the release of Apple's tablet, the ipad. I've ripped off the latest news just in case you have trouble accessing the site:

Steve Jobs revealed the Apple iPad today, its much-awaited tablet computer (see our live notes). Jobs positions it as a third computing device between a laptop and a smartphone geared towards the “key tasks” of Web browsing, email, sharing photos, watching videos, playing games, and reading digital books. All current iPhone apps will run on the device, as well as new games and digital books designed specifically for it. An enhanced iPhone SDK released today will support both the iPhone and the iPad.

"Some specs: The device has a 9.7 inch display, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is half-an-inch thick. It is powered by new chip made by Apple itself, a 1 GHz A4 and will come with 16Gb to 64 GB of storage. It supports WiFi, has an accelerometer, compass, and built-in speaker and microphone, just like the iPhone. The screen is a full capacitive multi-touch screen. Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours. And it will cost $499." - Courtesy of techcrunch. Thanks guys

The iPad also comes with a new app called iBooks, of which there is absolutely no information about on the internet (yet). If you go to ibooks.com you'll see it's owned by a domain squatter who even now is probably getting a letter from Apple's legal representatives (give us the domain name or we kill you).

What is the ibook format? PDF? Ah, that would be interesting as we all know the printing industry runs on PDF. Probably not, as copy protection in the PDF is easily hackable so not very attractive to Apple. Still, the market has been missing an ebook reader/tablet that can give a nice visual presentation of colored PDFs and now the market has it.

The magazine publishers and newspapers are probably lining up at Apple's door trying to get their stuff in ibook format, whatever it is. As for printing? Well, this has been coming down the pipeline for quite awhile. What is your strategy for adapting?

UPDATE: Popular Mechanics liveblogged the event and has more info.

Only youtube video I could find of the event was a 41 second clip courtesy of NY Post. Oh well.

Thread over at Printplanet about Adobe killing the Print Service provider program.
Lots of people not too happy. Dov Isaacs, to his credit, is jumping in and speaking for Adobe. Good for him, too many vendors that sell to printers don't actually, you know, communicate with printers on forums when tough decisions have to be made.
Dov's been around for years and actually knows the printing business, which puts him head and shoulders above the usual marketing drone that try to "message" in this business and get their heads bitten off as a result (not by me, of course, I am always sweetness and honey).
Okay, enough of the Dov-lovefest. Printers are complaining that Adobe is pulling the rug out from underneath them. So are even threatening to move back to Quark. Dov, to his credit, did not giggle when Quark was mentioned. But he did say that basically the Adobe Print Provider membership was dropping off and so was revenue. Which allows me to grind my axe ask this question: When are we going to see a printer arbitrage program that leverages media buys on the internet?

Let me explain: So Adobe had the Print Service Provider program. HP did Marketsplash. Even Quark got in the game. All the same idea. You go to the HP/Adobe/Quark website and look for a printer or for some printing to be done. Whatever, now two out of these three program are dead (Yeah Adobe's program was more than printing services arbitrage but don't stop me, I'm on a roll) and nobody is thinking Quark's thing is going to last long against Vistaprint.

Why did these program fail? Well, nobody visited the web sites, I guess. Okay, so what was the plan to drive traffic to the printing arbitrage websites? AFAIK, there wasn't one. Or there was one, it was a secret plan that never made it to light of day.

Okay, so maybe these programs would have worked if the web sites had generated a high amount of traffic that converted to leads for Jim and Jenny's medium-sized print shop down the street. In case you missed it, most leads for printing come from the internet now. You don't believe me? Try bidding on the keywords "business cards" or "poster printing" on Google search or Bing! I tried last year for some affiliate program and stopped when the bidding got to $5 a click.

You just can't get leads off the internet for print business in any type of volume unless you got the dollars to negotiate for media buys with Google, Yahoo, Facebook, 360pulse, and all the other ad networks out there. So I don't get why these guys didn't think of lead arbitrage. You know, buy traffic and send it to the local printer and put in some tracking and charge for either raw clicks or lead conversions. The system wouldn't be simple to implement but not impossible either. Remember, I'm talking about Adobe, Quark and HP, you know there's got to be somebody in those companies that may know a little bit about coding.

Ah well,  a lead arbitrage network for printers will come along one day, it's just a mystery why it hasn't come already.

Hyperlocalblogger has an entry on how to turn your blog into a printable newspaper. The company is called zinepal.com and it looks like it caters to blogs that focus on small communities or areas - which makes sense. Suppose you have a blog or web site and your target audience is 2000 to 20000 people in a reasonably small geographic area. Print out 5 to 10K copies of your blog at your local printer, distribute in store shops and community centres and presto, instant credibility and more eyeballs.

From a printer's point of view, you have to like it a lot. You get a PDF file nicely formatted instead of some godforsaken Word file. If I was a printer catering to small local customers, I would link to this site. Nowadays, more content creators have blogs rather than copies of Indesign.

Oh, you want to see what this blog looks like as a PDF-formatted newspaper? Check out Prepress Pilgrim as a zine here.

Allan dug this up. Not much has changed. I'm still fat 'cause I'm busy looking after 3 kids and don't have time to exercise. Allan is still thin because he's a Daddy too looking after a couple (I think it's a couple but I may have lost track).

Worthwhile to watch because it's filmed at the Gilmore building which is the headquarters for Kodak Burnaby. Try to look beyond the fat guy and check out the surroundings. The origins of that building are quite interesting - it was originally built as a chemical testing laboratory. The original air conditioning system was too powerful for office use, setting one was too cold and setting two could make the coffee in your mug turn to ice.

The architecture of the building made it look rather futuristic. At least once during my tenure there, staff was told to leave early on a Friday as a film crew would take over the building and work on a sci-fi movie or TV show, I forget which.

Gees, you just can't make this up. Let's see, it's been less than a year since HP tried to roll out Marketsplash. Now Quark comes out with Quarkpromote. But you just can't too upset about these things anymore. Everybody, from Walmart down to Mom & Pop around the corner thinks hey, let's set up a website and partner with some offset printer, and sell some business cards! What could be easier.

Well, okay, let me tell you about the razor-thin margins in this industry. If you want to compete on cost, you better be able to cut costs better than anybody else around. And I mean, do more than put in single-ply toilet paper in the men's washroom. You better re-engineer the whole production process, which by the way would require some capital investment up front.

But hey enough of me shooting my mouth off,  let's quantify this assertion (I love lapsing into corporate-speak, this blog is the only place where I get to do it).  Right on the front page of Quarkpromote, they want to charge $59.65 for 250 business cards. And they claim that the "free" business card competitors will actually charge you$59.95 by including "hidden" costs. Oh really? Well, I think I owe it to my readership (both of them, thanks Mom) to do some super-duper heavy investigative sleuthing and actually surf over to web site and do some competitive pricing.

Hmmm, which web site should I pick? How about Vistaprint (surprise)?And guess how much it cost:

Now, I rechecked the Quark promote site and they offer color on the back too for that price, whereas my order just has black-and-white on the back. Also, I didn't choose the "professional" template option at Vistaprint. Okay, whatever. Congratulations, if we squint real hard, possibly you match Vistaprint on price.

However, Vistaprint pretty has the biggest affiliate army in the business card niche. I mean, check out any website that even barely mentions office supplies or stationary or whatever, and you'll find an ad for Vistaprint. Their payouts are pretty good, lots of independent internet marketers are making their daily bread supplying leads to Vistaprint, which seems to paying them off and still making money in the meantime.

I haven't found an affiliate network for Quarkpromote yet. Hey, has the average business card buyer even heard of Quark?

Right, I'm a bit late with this sorry. The last few days I have been struggling to deliver an e-commerce backend to a client, to replace a backend that was an affront and insult to webmasters the world over. I have a standard rule of thumb: If the code is so lousy that I can do a better job rewriting and replacing it myself, then the code was truly crap. Developers who have worked with me in the past would agree with this assertion.

Anyways, that reminds of a joke that a senior project manager told me when I was a very junior project manager:  What's the only sure-fire way to make software developers write code quicker? Answer:  Offer to assist them in writing the code. But on to the topic at hand:

So in my last couple of posts I made a bunch of assertions about Prinergy, and a fair number of people responded challenging my assertions.  A short list would include the following statements:

1.  Modern software projects are portable enough that the transfer of the Prinergy code base to Israel is achievable and not even controversial.

2. It is insanity for Kodak to kill off their crown jewel, so why would they do so?

3. Prinergy customers won't switch because there is nothing else to switch to.

4.  The team in Israel already has experience with the code base, so it's not like they are taking ownership of an unknown product.

Okay, all these assertions should be taken seriously. But let's look at what happened in context, let's take about three or six or ten steps back and look at the whole big picture.

1. Kodak has had a crappy year.

2. Kodak had a crappy last quarter (60% down in sales)

3. Cash is burning up.

4. Stream inkjet is suppose to save Kodak's bacon.

5. However Stream is in beta and Kodak can't recognize revenue or ship in signficant quantities unless Stream is in early production.

Okay, keeping all that stuff in your head, let us pose two questions:

1. How important is it to Kodak to have Prinergy development in a ready-state, that is able to fix bugs, merge new features and issues service and even minor revisions.

2. What is the linkage between Stream and Prinergy?

3.  When will the Prinergy development team in Israel get to ready-state?

Okay, so in my opinion (and oh how I enjoy writing that phrase "in my opinion" on my own frickin' blog as no one can veto my opinion HERE MMMHHHAAAAA,  HHHHHAAA <- Evil laugh) the answers are:

1. It's really important. More important than whatever cost savings were achieved this quarter by canning the Burnaby development team.

2. Linkage between Prinergy and Stream is significant and discoveries made in the beta program of Stream will necessitate changes upstream (in Prinergy). Yeah, yeah, the story is that they have compartmentalized the two products by creating a connectivity team between Prinergy and Stream. Oh, jolly well done.

Hey why don't we ask a former ex-project manager of Creo about connectivity teams that span continents? Why, that would be me.

No, no you say, maybe we ask the opinion of a project manager who has been to both Vancouver and Israel, and as an added bonus worked on output device connectivity between Prinergy and output devices designed and built in Israel.

Why, what an amazing coincidence, if I check my resume I see that I was the project manager for the CS Xpose program from about 2001 to 2004. CS Xpose was the application used to connect Prinergy to the Lotem Quantum. I worked with a bunch of guys over at Herzliya, although I won't embarrass any of them by naming names.

Listen, saying you got a connectivity team doesn't mean everything is going to run smoothly, especially if it's chaos on at least one side of the programme.

By the way, you guys are running Firewire or USB to the Stream, right? The data connection to the Lotem was SCSI when I was the PM, and it was always driving me crazy that it was SCSI.

3. When will Israel get ready-state? And the answer is, off the top of my head. Two quarters. Oh sure, if they go into crisis-mode (And they can be pretty good at producing in crisis mode. Probably because they are surrounded by Arabs who want to kill them all) they can release a service pack in the spring. A real limited service pack. But I don't think that group will start having aha moments about the code base until the summer. Now don't get commenting on my blog about me disrespecting the Israelis. I can remember years ago when every now and then a key developer would leave Burnaby and then right away, code fixes could easily slip weeks or months. So I'm being generous here.

Will Israel get ready-state in time to close off the Stream beta? If they don't, how will that affect the revenue numbers for Kodak in early 2010? I don't know, but I do have memories of my PM stint on the Xpose project. I do remember taking calls from the president (that would Judi Hess) when it got close to the end of the quarter saying they would miss revenue targets by $5 million unless I got Xpose out of beta tout-suite. And that Amos, who liked facing the financial analyst about as much as taking acid baths, would not be happy at having to explain where he lost $5 million.

Now contrast the situation that I faced in 2002 with what is going on now. I would say the stakes have been raised ten-fold. And the hurdles?

Gees, you've got to be kidding. You guys are getting upset because I'm saying Prinergy is dead. I've got guys emailing me that Kodak is on the verge of a bright and glorious future in commercial inkjet. But what I see is a company bleeding so bad it's amputating limbs to keep the trunk and head alive just a weeee bit longer.

Kodak pulls out of this, it will be the greatest comeback in American business history. Don't hold your breath.

In case you missed it, Xerox announced last week that it has developed silver ink that can used to print electronic circuits.
In case you were wondering, the printed circuit board (PCB) industry was estimated to be worth $76 billion in 2007.
Not much in the way of practical details from the press releases. the implications are that the ink will be used only in inkjets, not litho or flexo or gravure, which is really to bad. So if you are a printer and you want to hack around a bit, you can't just buy a gallon of the ink, print out some circuit board on heavy stock and see what you get. Too bad.
But hey, if you have some spare time, the software for designing PCB boards is free, if you can believe that.
If I was a printer with some downtime, I would at least check it out. I mean, the PCB industry is not going to go away anytime soon, unlike some other niches (cough, newspaper/magazine) that once needed the services of a printer.

So when cruising the printceo blog, I find out that newsprint production will fall by 1/3 in 2009 from the previous year, or by 1.5 million tons.. Thannks for your contribution to western civilization by allowing greater public discourse. Don't let the door bang you on the butt while you are on the way out.
And oh yeah, magazine print production will fall by 25% or million tons. Hey, have you seen Newsweek lately? Or what's left of it?
In the meantime, packaging chugs along. How long until flexo overtakes litho in net economic value creation, not to mention prepress employment? What does flexo do? It doesn't provide information (not word-information anyways) so it doesn't compete with the internet. Flexo makes everyday things more beautiful. Check out these awesome packaging designs from designer daily.nn

So, instead of digging myself out from the usual massive load of work that I face on a weekly basis, I procrastinated somewhat by reading one of the excellent series of articles by Rolling Stone about the usual fraud and swindle on Wall Street.
Naturally of course, I was curious to check Kodak's share price. Ah yes, it's going down again, after a most mysterious spike upwards in late summer.
Well, the third quarter numbers are coming out this week. Shall we hazard a guess to what the numbers will be? I'll go out on limb and say that they will suck, but the share won't go down because all the naked short sellers will be covering by then. And laughing at you and me.
Note: The title of this post refers to a Wall Street practice of buying non-existent shares (a perfectly legal practice) from a market-marker and flooding the market as to lower the share price.