Comments on: Who Killed the Brisque?

By: Fru på vift. « PeoWagstrom’s Weblog

Fru på vift. « PeoWagstrom’s Weblog — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 13:16:06 +0000

[...] på vift. Frugan är på tjänsteärende så då passar jag på att utnyttja snudd på uttjänta kunskaper. Det ät nog ett tecken på att jag varit i branschen ett tag när jag stöter på utrustning jag [...]

By: ALarson

ALarson — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 16:22:57 +0000

FZO,
Some readers might recall seeing Director, which was actually Creo Vancouver’s attempt at giving the 9000+ Brisques out there a second wind, by putting the CTLW engines within Prinergy, thereby taking advantage of the Oracle Database, load-balancing, floating license, integrated Preps blah blah blah. In 2005, it was the main product I was showing in Chicago at McCormick Place.

Many folks thought Creo would stop the Brisque on Day 1 after Creo bought Scitex years before. Reality was the opposite, and when the underlying weakness of the CTLW format really showed, Evo became the logical stepping stone for Brisque users to migrate. It had a lot of the architecture of the Brisque, except for the Adobe CSPI PDF engine instead of CTLW. Right down to the plug-ins like PlateBuilder, the development team made it very similar in functionality to what FAF and Presstouch had provided for users, without the dongles. All the Preps templates migrated. The dongles, licenses on Brisque were allowed to migrate into a much more productive system that used a fraction of the harddrive activity, network packets that a Brisque could do. It also bridged many users into the SquareSpot imaging via Print Console, and got away from the headaches of TurboScreening and the fibrehead of imagesetters that were showing their age. IBM wanting a fortune for hardware didn’t help.
I would have loved to not only seen the Brisque ported to OSX, but instead would have loved to have seen Prinergy natively coded on OSX but I am an old prepress Mac hack that worked with DJ back as far as early 1990s in the PRN to Selectset and Lino days. Good luck finding more than a carload of Mac developers in Vancouver back in 1997 to do that, let alone today. Most programmers are PC only, and the fact that the minority of the developers are true Mac lovers, including some of the early visionaries that sketched out the concept for Prinergy at Araxi restaurant at Whistler are as Mac-friendly as you will find anywhere. Reality is, it takes millions of dollars of R&D and bodies to crank out this code base, and Windows on a Dell has become a pretty rock solid system without the cold-starts of a Unix system. Love that term. All you cdsdky’s out there had a sweet system in the Brisque that made Scitex and Creo the workflow powerhouse it is today.

Creo and Kodak has always respected the Herzelia gang and what they cranked out near the sea north of Tel Aviv.

Having Prinergy Connect/Evo around to show to Brisque customers has been my bread and butter for several years now and they still keep coming. No complaints here.

By: Fake Zeke Orro

Fake Zeke Orro — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 06:29:59 +0000

Well, I’m going to pretend to be one of the guys named in this interesting story, and take up DJ’s offer to comment.

This battle never about the logistics of software development. What we argued about was vision – and from my take, being good at logistics might keep you from doing something really stupid, but it is also usually means you are less likely to take the risks to create anything amazingly new or innovative. iPods don’t come from logistics masters…

The argument that porting Brisque drivers to Mac would have been costly is totally bogus. I was in contact with a very small semi-secret team that had already prototyped the entire Brisque engine in OS X in their spare time. It was a small effort and not hard since they shared Unix underpinnings, and the PS/M was already in production.

One reason Creo Vancouver wanted to kill the Brisque is that we had been competing with it so long, some saw it is an evil thing that should be destroyed. I had a more Sun Tzu approach, of respecting your enemy, as it made us both stronger. Creo did not want Brisque competing with Prinergy. I thought they could together expand our market.

In my then picture of the future, completing the port of Brisque to OS X with an Aqua UI at a price under $10,000 would have replaced the PS/M and completely sealed up low-end RIP market, putting Harlequin and Rampage out of the running. Brisque had enormous brand value, but was seen to be an aging product line. Our optimal strategy would have been to add our PDF normalizing, color management and trapping as optional offerings so that CT-LW fans could test and migrate their workflows to PDF (which they agreed was the inevitable future) at the rate they felt best met the risk/reward economics of their businesses.

Instead, I failed to make my argument, but like Cassandra, I had to watch the goodwill of Brisque users drift away as we stopped the PS/M, strangled the Brisque to death, and tried to jam (arguably better) PDF workflow down customers’ throats. Then, amazingly, Creo proceeded to create its own competitor to Prinergy anyway, a very Brisque-like PDF RIP called Evo.

But that’s another blog comment…
Regards deej,
fzo

By: Dov Isaacs

Dov Isaacs — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 01:57:17 +0000

For what it is worth, one of the big problems with Brisque was its CT/LW architecture when it came to dealing with non-opaque objects. It would have been exceptionally difficult to port the Adobe PDF Print Engine, a major feature of Prinergy 4.0, to Brisque. With 20-20 hindsight, the decision to “kill” Brisque probably would have been made later on when the Adobe PDF Print Engine issues came up if it hadn’t been already made.

By: William Mitchell

William Mitchell — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 21:22:04 +0000

Wow,…nice play by play!

I was the manager of a prepress dept for 10 years, and we were a Brique Shop. Upgraded from the PS2!! So I was a long time CT/LW guy. Must admit at the time there was nothing out there as good. Especially trapping and automation. Can you believe we called that automation back then?

Side note.

Before leaving that shop I was trying for a technical sales position with Creo at the time. Had 3 very long conversations, like a pre interview. The last 2 conversations were picking my brain about pdf and what I thought about the future and pdf workflow. Hindsight!!

By: Mark Jetzer

Mark Jetzer — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:31:12 +0000

Love my Prinergy system. Miss my Brisque Pack/Pandora. I was one of the first North American installs of Brisque Pack/Pandora doing Packaging. Spent a lot of hours on the phone with Barak working out Issues.

We switched after the CUA in Hollywood, Fl. Knew then that the Brisque was dead. Everything was Prinergy.

By: Mark Jetzer

Mark Jetzer — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 16:28:56 +0000

Love my Prinergy System, but I miss my Brisque. There was a nice simplicity to it. It worked, it was rock solid, last minute changes were easy (if you knew PressTouch.) I was one of the first Brisque Pack installs along with Pandora. Spent alot of time on the phone with Barak and others working out Brisque Pack/Pandora issues. Doing Packaging on a Brisque, THAT’S a prepress challenge! I went to the CUA (Hollywood, FL) and pretty much knew after the Brisque was dead. It just couldn’t handle the new Adobe stuff. No one was talking about the “NEW” features, or showing off the next version. Prinergy was everywhere.

Now, if I could just get the Kodak to make Prinergy PowerPack more like Esko.

By: ALarson

ALarson — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 23:28:48 +0000

I was the main Brisque Demo guy in Vancouver, while also showing Prinergy. I would like to add my $.02CDN which is that I think the drop shadows and transparency effects in InDesign were the straws that broke the camel’s back. All boardroom history aside, the CT/LW format tumbled like Paul Bunyan and Prinergy’s greatest migrations resulted.

I checked today and since October 2004 which is around the time of this pretty feature arriving on the scene, I personally did 777 demos. The majority of these were Brisques who all had the stressed out Prepress Manager starting off with “I am having trouble with transparency”. If I had a dime.

I have been to Israel twice to meet with the Brisque team and I can attest that they are world class and can stan with their heads high with what they built.

But, man do I love showing those files in Prinergy. Shooting fish in a barrel.

By: Chris Riley

Chris Riley — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 15:29:58 +0000

This is a topic you see a lot of on the prepress forum websites…and it interests me a lot. when i first moved to my current employer (just over a year ago), we were using the Brisque workflow. i had been a rampage user for almost 10 years, so lets just say i HATED the brisque. when i started here, the word was we were getting Prinergy already, so i knew i wasnt going to spend too much time learning the nuts and bolts of brisque, since it was out the door. i just found the whole interface slow and clunky, and not user friendly at all. all this being said, almost EVERYONE who had worked on it for years loved it, and hated to see it go. it has been nearly a year since the switch to prinergy, and i cant speak for everyone, but i feel confident in saying that we havent looked back even a minute and regretted making that switch. some of the conversations i have read online get pretty heated, so it is clear this a fierce allegiance to the brisque workflow from a lot of people, so it must have been a pretty great product, but even in the short time i worked on the brisque i cant believe that ANYONE can say that it even slightly stands up to the capabilities of prinergy.

i could be entirely off-base saying that, but id sure like to hear other comments.

btw, great play-by-play of the whole discussion, very good insight as to what happened.