Every once in awhile, I see a post in a prepress forum from a Brisque customer who is completely p—-d off that Kodak is discontinuing development/support/upgrade for the Brisque workflow. But the untold story is that they had no say in the matter.

Now, before I go any further, I should disclose some personal details: 1. It’s no skin off my nose as to whether Kodak gets flamed in prepress forums or not. I left Creo in 2004 just before the Kodak takeover with a very reasonable settlement so I neither have hard feelings or nor any love for Kodak. 2. I am currently an independent consultant with absolutely no chance of ever getting business from Kodak, not because Kodak hates ex-Creo employees or anything like that, but because of the Canadian dollar (65 cents US in the glory days of Creo, 99 cents US today and oh boy does that affect the economics of doing international business in Vancouver.) 3. But I think truth matters, and a lot of stuff is going down the memory hole and that is bothering me more and more these days.

Anyways enough of that personal crap, let’s get to the crux of the story: Who killed the Brisque?

The death blow was made in the winter of 2002 (January or February, I think) at the head office of Vancouver, at a very high-level, well-attended meeting chaired by none other than Amos Michelson, then CEO of Creo. THE frickin’ Amos Michelson, you should go and google “Amos and Creo” if you don’t know who he is.

Pretty well every software VIP in the organization was there, representatives from Vancouver (Stan Coleman, Barry Quart, Dave Kauffman) and Herzlia (Gershon Tauger, Yoav Telem, Barak Paltiel). I can’t remember if COO Mark Dance was there (probably not, he wasn’t a software guy) and whether Judi Hess was made president or not by then. Definitely at the time, Printcafe was turning into a nightmare for Amos and that had a bearing on the decision.

Me? I managed to attend the meeting but as an extremely junior project manager, I had no role or say in any decision, except perhaps to help some of the VP butter their croissants. But I was an eyewitness to the discussion.

Amos led the charge to kill off the Brisque, with Barak Paltiel and Dave Kauffman pushing back to have Brisque ported from AIX to Apple’s OS X. There was huge discussion (and if you have ever seen two Israelis engage in a “passionate” discussion, you’ll know what I mean). Paltiel was the Brisque guy through and through and Dave was the “vision” guy.

You have to remember at the time, Apple was nothing more than a niche player only supported by Mac fanatics. Dell was eating everybody’s lunch and Windows 2000 was chomping up huge market share from the Unix players who were more than halfway down the road to oblivion. IBM was walking or running away from AIX as fast as it could and pushing Linux hard. So the Brisque on AIX had to go.

The North American sales guys, the rainmakers who had Amos’ cellphone number on speed dial, hated the Brisque. They had sold Prinergy with multple VLF CTPs to all the big boys like RRD, Quebecor and Quad Graphics and they had huge political pull. So that was a factor too.

Anyways, there was a HUGE discussion with many players putting their two cents, and it ended with Amos getting consensus from everybody to kill the Brisque, with the exception of Barak (I can’t remember if Kauffman caved in the end, forgive me Dave).

During the discussion Stan said that porting drivers to Apple OS X was going to be too difficult. And as usual, nobody noticed what Stan said because he spoke with a soft voice. But I think logistics killed the Brisque.

And now we entered into the realm of speculation: I just told you what I saw, now I will tell you what I think happened behind the scenes. I THINK Amos asked Judi which way to jump and Judi asked Stan which to jump and Stan looked at the logistics like he always does and said I can’t do Prinergy and Brisque and all the other stuff that you guys want me to do, cut out the Brisque. Amos was a smart guy and I think by then he had figured out that whenever he followed Judi’s advice in with regard to software, he looked like a genius, and whenever he didn’t consult with Judi, he didn’t look so smart (see Printcafe).

And Judi wouldn’t go against Stan no matter what, because Stan was the logistics guy and he didn’t have a political bone in his body. Nobody outside of the software group ever “got” that, that if Stan didn’t think something was going to happen, then it wasn’t going to happen.

And at the time, we had too many things going on in the software development group, too many high-risk products (like Six Degrees) in the pipeline and Amos/Judi needed guys like Stan and they trusted him probably more than any other executive. My personal experience dealing with Stan was that if he ever had a personal agenda, I never saw it in my five years working with him. Time and time again we would go into meetings and some prima donna would think Stan was a nobody and crap all over his shoes. And every time Stan wouldn’t say nothing, not even notice, and just focus on the LOGISTICS or stumbling blocks of whatever project/problem on the table, and look for resolution. And every software project engineer in the Willingdon building knew that. And Amos KNEW that every software project engineer KNEW that about Stan, if you get my drift.

Anyways, so Stan whispered in the meeting that porting drivers to OS X was going to be too difficult, which is to say he couldn’t spare the bodies for the massive undertaking of porting Brisque to OS X, AND deal with the other five million projects being thrown at his head. Passion can win you battles, but logistics decide the war.

In hindsight, (JUST MY OPINION) we shouldn’t have killed the Brisque. We had good margin on both Prinergy and the Brisque, and we should have told the North American sales guys to just deal with it, sell both. What we should have done was whack pretty well all the other goofy software projects that we were doing, like Six Degrees, that were sucking up huge executive bandwidth. IN HINDSIGHT, we were rolling the dice on a lot of goofy code that had little chance of ever being profitable, and very good chance of making us look bad. Which it did.

We should have taken a flamethrower to Printcafe venture, a complete nightmare of a venture run by people that couldn’t even control their code base.

But now I’m second guessing, and no one could have guessed what had been laid in store for us in the future years. In software development, it’s the latency that kills you, and makes very smart people look dumb.

Note: If there were any other attendees to that fateful meeting, and if I got any of the facts wrong, please let me know in either the comments or e-mail me privately if you don’t want to be publicly identified, and I will update this posting.