There are two avenues of attack for Kodak to compete with the big boys: Variable data-printing with NexPress and competing in the inkjet arena by lowering the cost of ink. I’ll tackle each one separately.

First, cheap ink for inkjets. Really, this is a no-brainer. HP and Epson have such a lock on the market that if one of the companies didn’t exist, the other one would be in antitrust hell before Bill Gates would have time to shake his head. So you kick the giants where it hurts and go after the fat margins on the ink. Will they have success in the consumer market? Ahhhh, I don’t know, I mean just how cheap are they making the cartridges? Are they making promises written with the blood of their CEO that they will never boost the cost of the ink?

Do you know what would be cool? If they came out with a vegetable-oil-based ink that was sold in a one litre tank (refillable). You hook up the tank to the printer via gravity feed. Oh yeah, and the tank of ink sells for ten bucks. I would buy that printer for sure, as well as every offset commercial shop from here to Bejing via London. Even if the printer sold for 10 times the cost of an equivalent HP or Epson, I bet the commercial guys would go for it. Why? Because the MBA geniuses at HP or Epson don’t understand is that every offset print owner in the world has had to pay off a press at time or another, so they are VERY familiar with TCO - total cost of ownership. Heck, it’s tatooed on their foreheads.

But will Kodak go down that path? Or will they fall prey to the “click-charge” screw game? Boy, don’t you just love that when the sales guy walks in the door with the elaborate “click-charge” Excel spreadsheets? Mmmmmmm, tasty 8^p

Their second strategy is the variable-data printing with Nexpress which has been around as long as hmmm, the internet. Just kidding. Actually, I remember the Nexpress buzz when I joined Creo back in 1997. I’ve never seen one, so I truly speak from ignorance (but that has never stopped me before.) Kodak has a vast amount of technological acumen with regard to variable-data printing via the former Spire RIP development team in Herzlia. Apparently there is some buzz out of Burnaby about giving Prinergy some variable data printing capability but don’t quote me on that, that buzz has been around for about five years.

Now before I started ripping the Nexpress, I just wanted to say that I think variable data technology is pretty cool. If you are doing a mass-marketing campaign, and you can tailor a catalogue mail-out with individual data feeds, then you can up your conversion rate from 1% to 5,10, or even 15%. In theory, a printer who can offer variable data-printing should be able to sell their services at a premium.

So why hasn’t variable-data printing taken off? My guess is that to make the workflow system “work” with variable -data, you need a helluva front-end which hasn’t been developed yet. I never saw the Spire front-end but I evaluated some variable-data software from an independent vendor and it completely sucked, even a experienced system admin would have trouble making it work, and you are talking about digital printing. Remember one of the supposed main advantages of digital printing is that you can get rid of your high-priced (and whiny) prepress sys admin/operators and replace them with cheapo teenages who can’t get a job at Starbucks because their acne is too bad.

Variable data printing needs an operator with a brain or better more intuitive software but the latter requires an real frickin’ software development team, not a group of 2 Indian programmers working on the code in between taking classes on proper call-center etiquette. I know the Spire guys always had problem maintain head count because in printing, you don’t make money selling software, but on the consumables (plates, ink, or click-charges). Variable data printing reduces consumption of consumables, ba-ding.

So what I am saying is that variable-data printing is stuck in purgatory until somebody figures out a business model that works. That’s where a wizard MBA is worth his or her weight in platinum. If Kodak can convince printers to buy their inkjet at a premium because of cheap ink, then they will do fine. If they can build a kick-ass front end for the Nexpress, then they can move that piece of gear too. Easy, easy.

Easy? I’m sorry, I meant to say that’s going to be tremendously hard. The value proposition is there but you are going to need good salespeople who can present a good business plan.  And people really knowledgeable about the traditional printing business.  Oh, and a little bit of courage too, because what I have just said flies in the face of all conventional wisdom of the last fifteen years. But that’s all.

New Imac in the shop, very nice for under $2000. The screen is massive. I mean, in my childhood, I think I attended movie theatres with smaller screens than this one.

Anyways, I’m getting it prepped for use for our Prinery operator. Here is what needs to go on it:

1. Prinergy workshop with Preps and VPS (Duh.)

2. Quark 7.31 (The Mac runs Leopard, so we have to have 7.31).

3. Microsoft Office for the Mac, especially Entourage so the operator can access her mail.

4. Cyberduck the ftp client.

5. Chicken of the VNC so she can remotely view other Macs, especially our Mac which is running the FTP server software

6. Pitstop 8.0 (Gotta upgrade as that is the only version that runs on Leopard).

7. Kodak Epson Proofer Client.

8. Suitcase Fusion version 12

9. Creative Suite 3 with Acrobat 8.0

I have a few licenses running on 30 day trial until the operator feels comfortable in switching over. Even though CS3 was running on a 30-day trial it expired today after 5 days. Whatever, oh I hope I get those stupid Adobe programs to safely activate  unlike last time.

Update: June 17th: Activated CS3 today. 2 programs out of three activated okay. Indesign is still out of commission. Hey! There is actually a patch to fix TRIAL version of Adobe software. These guys, they just kill me… 

First of all, it may sound like I’m complaining about the location of my workstation. Jackie and I share a room about 30 feet long and 20 feet wide. Jackie is easily more than 10 feet away. My workstation is by the door so I am constantly interrupted by people coming and out of the room, but I don’t complain for the following reason:

Quite frankly, sys admins in prepress are super lucky when it comes to office space. I know that in downtown Vancouver, white collar staff are rammed two or three into a small office maybe one quarter of the size of the room shared by Jackie and myself. Even worse, there are idiots who walk around espousing the idea of an “open-environment” offices, meaning 4 or 6 people are packed onto a long lunchtable with nothing more than laptops and a smile. I have seen these beastly flesh warehouses with my own eyes, horrific examples of human degradation where you couldn’t scratch your nose or your butt without at least 3 eyewitnesses present.

But I digress. On to the matter at hand. We do have to share the room with a fair amount of computer gear and prepress equipment, the largest of the latter being the magnificent Lotem Quantum 800 II. A beautiful machine, when combined with the Prinergy workflow systems, absolutely ensures many hours of leisure and surfing the web for many a Prinergy operator.

Just kidding about the last sentence. Actually us technicians in prepress work very hard indeed. I’m actually sweating right.

But the Lotem does have one tiny problem. When it makes plates, it sounds like a jet airliner. And it’s almost as loud. This is not entirely a bad thing, because it does allow me to cut short many a phone call with vendors trying to peddle useless crap, but a quieter prepress room would be a double-plus bonus.

So I have been poking around soundproofing.org and you can get these panels that are made of vinyl that are apparently almost as dense as lead. And you can put them on walls or floors and it really helps to deal with the sound.

But now I am wondering, there are umpteeth Lotem owners out there and do you guys have any good noise-suppression techniques for dealing with the Lotem?

Guess what I found:

It also show Insite working with the Prinergy 4.0 Workflow but be forewarned, Insite is a hefty addition, price-wise, if you want to get that as well as the basic Prinergy workflow.

Why would you want to buy Prinergy? Well I can’t answer that question for you, but I can recollect a conversation I had with a Creo salesguy many years ago that went like this?

Me: How ‘come you guys like selling Prinergy so much?
Sales guy: Well, if I sell Brisque or Rampage or whatever, next year or year after, if I want to sell more stuff to the shop, then I gotta resell the workflow all over again.
Me: But not with Prinergy?
Sales guy: Nope, once a shop goes Prinergy, it stays Prinergy forever.

So go ahead, drink the Kool-Aid.

Here is a story about a guy who made $60,000 a month off the internet with multiple web sites and Adsense.

I’ll summarize the story for you if you don’t have time to read it. Smart guy takes a few pages of text, buys thousands of domain names, automates the process of building web sites and puts Adsense on every page. After a certain period of time, he rakes in $60,000 a month which is basically pure profit.

Of course, he gets caught out by Google after a certain period of time but did you get the point of the story? The internet (and Google) needs content so much that even if you provide crap content, you can monetize it. Which bring me back to the printing business.

Even the smallest printer with a Prinergy system has a collection of PDF files that collectively numbers in the 1000s of pages. And the larger web printers probably have millions of pages indexed. What if those PDF pages in a Prinergy system were converted to HTML and then put on a web site to be indexed by Google? How much revenue would that generate?

Do printers own the copyright on those pages in their Prinergy system? No. But how hard would it be possible to enable revenue-sharing with the copyright owners? There are already many models for such systems operating like that on the web.

Actually, I think the monetization of Prinergy PDF repositories will begin to occur in the next three years, although it won’t be driven by the printers, but by the Adsenses-savvy marketeers who will see an opportunity to buy up the data repositories sold by bankrupt printers. Just a hunch.

So I get this comment on one of my posts that says this:

hi

i have a cracked prinergy evo 3.0.4.1, but it doesnot get the ip?

is the problem from crack or something else?

thanx alot

Mehdi

Well Mehdi, aka dumbass software pirate, allow me to help you out. Prinergy requires a dongle to run. That means you need a special USB stick which is coded to activate Prinergy, along with a extremely long license key that is tied to that specific USB key.

Wow, thanks for hitting my blog looking for help on how to illegal crack Prinergy software, you stupid numbnut. BTW, did you know that I was on the original Prinergy development team and I worked for Creo for seven years? Well, now you do.

Have fun trying to crack Prinergy, bonehead. Thanks for being a subscriber.

Walked into the shop today and the prepress operator was bored. That’s either very good or very bad. It could be bad because business is slow. It could very good because work is coming in and going out very fast right to the press.

In this case, because the owner is thinking about buying a new Mac for the prepress room, I think things are okay. In my fifteen plus years of prepress, I have come to believe there is a direct correlation between the financial health of a printing plant, and willingness to buy new Macs.

Anyways, prepress is like surfing. You are either standing on top of the surfboard riding the wave or you are 3 feet underwater. And Prinergy is one nice bigass surfboard.

So this got me to thinking, what was the best Prinergy customer I ever visited? Having travelled to Prinergy sites in 12 different countries (at least) and 15 US states, it was a bit of a difficult choice, but my vote went to IRL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Those guys were awesome, whenever we had to a beta in Europe, we would try to get those guys in on the program. Go figure, it’s a printer in Switzerland and when you go in the shop, guys are leaving their Flash games up onscreen, and giving each other email addresses like “JamesBond@irl” or whatever. And not a manager in site.

But truly professional, those guys could make a dead rat run a marathon. We would throw a beta in there and not a week would pass without getting a detailed site summary carefully listing all the bugs they encountered and every possible workaround. In near-perfect english. Jeepers, we couldn’t even get our own application specialists in the software group to write decent beta bug reports.

Hope those guys are doing okay, I did work with them back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Good place to work and I hope it stayed that way.  If you see good tech people and no managers then that means the tech guys have good managers standing behind them (99% of the time). But the only problem with good managers is that, sadly, they don’t stay around forever.

One of the great pain in the rear ends with regard to Prinergy integration is its refusal to play nice with Windows drivers. Hooking up a Prinergy system to Lotem Quantum or Trendsetter is a cinch. If your plotter or 3rd party imagesetter (if anybody still uses those things anymore) has a Postscript RIP in front, hey no problem.
But outputting correctly to a copier or deskjet inkjet is pure hell, if not impossible. You have to have a Postscript driver and a lot of manufacturers don’t provide one. And the ones that do, most times the Postscript driver is not well maintained (translation: buggy as all get out).
So I was cruising the web one day and found Hot Folder 1.2 on a shareware site. It takes in TIFF and spools to Windows drivers printer and as soon as I saw it, it was like, oh yeah, I’m gonna try that.

You can run it for about a week and then you have to pay $20 for the license. And I paid the twenty, let me tell you. I can’t tell you how many hours in the field I spent trying to get Prinergy to play nice with 3rd party printers, so $20 was like nothing for me.
Just for giggles, I tried a direct connect from Prinergy to an Epson 7000. After rooting around on the Epson web site for a little while, I found the non-Postscript driver. I set up the Holder folder application (really easy to set up, I don’t even need to post instructions), and spooled a 360 dpi TIFF to the hot folder. It worked. Then I tried a 720 dpi Tiff. It didn’t work. I then fiddled around with the driver settings and tried again. It worked. Man oh man, where was this application about 7 years ago?
Note: This would probably work with Apogee workflow as well. And Artpro. And virtually any workflow system that can output a continous tone TIFF.

Someday my grandchildren will ask me: What was the biggest disaster you ever witnessed? And I will answer them: The summer of 1998, the day Time Magazine was late at Roto-Smeets.

To say it was a disaster is an understatement. To miss the deadline of Time Magazine back then was an apocalypse, unforgiveable. When the Platemaster system went down, the board of directors was notified as well as the executive team of Roto-Smeets, one of the largest printers in Europe. Time specified in their contract that if you were late, then the contract was broken and they could go elsewhere. And I was there when it happened.

I was actually there to do damage control over another bloop-up, otherwise known as Prescript I. You see, back then, Creo didn’t have the PDF workflow today known as Prinergy. Instead it had a Postscript-based system called Platemaster, which was actually years ahead of its time. That workflow had a fanatical following that held onto the system years after Prinergy started to dominate the large printer space. But it did have some flaws, like no trapping. Or color management. Oh yeah, and because it was Postscript-based, and because back then Windows servers topped out at 350mhz, every once in a while the RIP would barf on a imposed signature of Postscript, usually at the worst possible time.

Prescript was suppose to fix the RIP barfs, by “cleaning” the Postscript so that there would be no surprises at the end of the line, when it was time to make plates. I joined the Prescript team just after the release of Prescript I. How well did it work? About as well as any version I of any software product. Not well enough (cough) to meet the expectations of our customer base.

Creo Europe was especially upset about Prescript. Okay, they were pissed. A lot of big deals were on the edge because Prescript had been advertised to fix the RIP barfs which were killing the platemakers and it when it had been released, it stank out the joint.
Earlier in the year, I had been sent on a fact-finding tour to gather problem files and generally offer my Johny-Canuck butt to various customers so they could kick it and feel better. Now I had returned with version 2 to save the day, be a hero, and not incidentally, get some deals closed so that Creo Europe could have a good quarter.

Roto-Smeets was one of those customers that needed some impressing. And then one of their Platemaster systems blew up. Okay I wasn’t actually there when the moment of disaster struck, it was actually Matthieu Bossan who bore eyewitness testimony. Matthieu was one of two (count ‘em, two) application engineers employed by Creo Europe in 1998 (The other one was Tomas Leferverbre. We also had a demo specialist by the name of Stefan Steinle who knew his way around Platemaster. Stefan had the joy of demonstration Prescript to various customer - “Here is Prescript ripping its way through a job…, Scheiße! it crashed again…”)

So Matthieu goes in to install a service pack on one of the Platemaster servers. He installs the service and does a reboot. He waits for the server to come back up again. And waits… and waits. Baby that server is hard down, as in hardware down. Service call goes into DEC and the parts won’t come in until after Time Magazine is due to hit the trucks.

Now the Roto-Smeets guys weren’t dumb, they had TWO platemaster systems. But in the summer of 1998, ad revenue for TIME was good and the size of the magazine had grown and grown, meaning more pages and more signatures and more plates that had to be imagined in finite amount of time So some calculations were made and oh scheiße they weren’t going to make ALL plates in time according to the contract.

And that’s where things stood the day that we will suppose to go into Roto-Smeets and do the Prescript II install. Everybody was in shock. We were told not to wear any Creo golf shirts or T-shirts or anything like that. But the Creo Europe guys were happy to see us from Vancouver. Rolo-Smeets was based in Holland and one thing about the Dutch is that they are raised by their moms and dads to be nice to Canadians (This is because of WWII, when the First Canadian Army liberated Holland from the Nazis in 1944. Every year in my hometown of Ottawa, there is a tulip festival when the Dutch send bulbs in gratitude).

So there we were, a group of Canadian stuck in the plant where Time was late, with a few Creo Belgians who made sure the Canadians were close at hand when the Dutch customers hovered around. Paul B. eventually showed up with the server that we were supposed to install Prescript on. Paul was so like many other prepress sys admins I meet over the years, capable and tough and squeezed on one side by buggy software and systems that didn’t quite work well together, and squeezed on the other side by upper management that didn’t understand IT very well but knew the cost of everything. So Paul was under a lot of pressure, and had been for quite awhile.

So I set to work on the server and of course the Prescript II application doesn’t want to install. Two hours later, the script that should have taken 3 minutes to run kept barfing. Of course this was the cherry on top of the icing of a scheiße cake. Finally we figure it out and I remember the exact solution more than 10 years later. For some strange reason the CD drive was mapped to the C: drive on the computer and on Windows NT 4.0 that causes the installer to abort. So we mapped the CD-ROM to another letter and it worked. Then Paul pulled out some crappy Postscript files that causes Prescript I to barf and they worked through Prescript II just fine. So we were able to retreat with some dignity that day.

The very next day I was part of a team to fly into Norway to install Prescript at another hot site. We nearly got stuck in Oslo when the unions in Norway decided to call a general strike. We asked just what the heck they were striking over but nobody could tell us the reason why, they had so much stinking oil up there and it was a nice summer day so why not call a general strike. There was only one flight out of the country in three days and we made that flight, the plane had been allowed to take off because it had organs aboard that were needed for a transplant patient in France.

When all the dust settled Roto-Smeets didn’t lose Time and eventually ordered a third Platemaster system. They may or may not have used the incident to get first dibs in Europe on a super-secret product that Creo was working on at the time, code name Araxi. I joined that team in autumn of 1998 and after about 3 name changes, the Araxi team released Prinergy in late 1999. Roto-Smeets was the first European customer of Prinergy and they made the first plate in Europe from the Prinergy system. I know this for sure because I was there when the plate was imaged. It was a VLF plate, 16-up, and Prinergy ate the signature like it was ice cream and spat out the plate so fast that Roto-Smeets never had to worry about being for Time, or any other job, every again.

And so Prinergy was released and the world changed for so many of us in the prepress universe but it was so very groovy because we were at the center of it all. The future looked to be without limits as Creo grew and grew and the dot com boomed and whatever we touched seemed to be put on the verge of a wonderful transformation. Like a previous generation in 1968 we had our summer of limitless possibilities and like that generation that had the betrayal of Watergate and the tragedy of Vietnam, we had the dot com crash and September 11th, 2001.

As for the European guys, Paul got eventually promoted and it still working at Smeets as far as I know. Matthieu got kicked upstairs to management. Tomas kept working in apps until I lost touch with him. Stefan moved to Vancouver and became the Prinergy product manager for about 3 years until he moved back to Munich with a wife and a baby - a little Canuck baby. As for me, I live in a little house in Vancouver with my wife and three small children who are sweet and innocent (like we all were once) and with a future that has limitless possibilities.

And so it goes.

No Photoshop for the Mac until maybe 2012.

It’s a development framework issue. Adobe is planning to port Photoshop to 64-bit. This is a non-trivial task, as the developers like to say.

But Apple is abandoning plans to port Carbon to 64 bit, so Adobe has to move to Cocoa. Another non-trivial task. That means you won’t see Photoshop CS 4 on Leopard anytime soooooooonnn.

Meanwhile, over in the land of Prinergy, the development managers are breaking their arms patting themselves on the back as the client GUI for Prinergy is written in Java. And nobody remembers the days of slow Prinergy workshops when it was running on G3 and G4s.

Uh-oh, I think Preps may have been written in Carbon. Any guesses as to when Preps will be written in 64-bit Cocoa?