Interview with Bud Colligan of Macromedia
This week we take a short break from our current project for some important news. I recently conducted an interview with Bud Colligan of Macromedia. In this interview he answered several very important Shockwave-related questions. Because some of the answers are contrary to the general comments I see on the Shockwave mailing list daily, I thought we would go ahead and publish this in the column this week to spread the word. Just as a side note, Bud was very informative and a pleasure to work with. So here are some of the questions and the answers Bud had for all of us.
Macromedia has been very successful in picking up quite a following on the Internet with offerings such as ShockWave. Are there any new services or applications that Macromedia might be developing as far as Internet technologies for people to develop with?
One of the things Macromedia is currently working on is ShockWave Audio, which is compression technology for audio that can give compression of 20 to 50 times depending on the quality you want to achieve. That's a new product in technology that we are going to bring to the market in the next month. ShockWave is often looked at as one product and we try to brand it that way, but it's really a set of plug-ins for authorware, Freehand, or Director. And as I said, "Soon we will have ShockWave Audio as well."
We are working across the various media types to make sure the Web pages are multimedia- and 3-D-based and have motion, sound, and interactivity. We are also working on the acquisition of I-band, which will provide an integration tool that pulls it all together to enable you to create both multimedia Web pages, and to manage large sites that are very dynamic and have database backends. We see our role as twofold. First, we develop tools to create both pages and sites that leverage rich media. Second, we need to develop play-back plug-ins for all the various digital media types of tools we have created.
Do you see Macromedia Internet-related products really gathering as much of the company's market share as your multimedia products have in that market? You mentioned that you want to see each one of your products fill a niche in the Internet product market. Do you see this as being a large market share opportunity for you?
Well, of course. Again, I think our products would not be as competitive if they didn't produce data that played well on the Internet. There's a strong linkage between either the print or CD-ROM market and tools that create content for the Internet. I think you have to have both. That's what "author once, publish anywhere" is all about. We certainly intend to be a very strong player in the Internet market. We have positioned our company so that every product has Internet components. We have the central Internet offering tool with Backstage.The goal of the company is to be the volume leader in graphics, multimedia, video, and Web publishing. We want our tools in those categories, which is basically all digital media, to be the leading tools in the industry. Yes, we expect our Web publishing tools to be number one. We have a long way to go. There's lots of big competitors. That's our inspiration.
One of the hottest Internet technologies is Macromedia's ShockWave. Can users expect to see one plug-in incorporating all the different Macromedia products?
No, there's not going to be one plug-in because there are such different capabilities as you move from a product like Freehand to a product like Director. Freehand images can be magnified to 25,000 percent. You can pan around the images. Freehand also enables you to deliver different color resolutions depending on the computer of viewer. By contrast, Director is what orchestrates all the multimedia on the screen.
No, I think there's going to be different plug-ins. But what we are going to do to make sure that all ShockWave plug-ins are similar is to engage in a number of agreements--you saw our agreement Monday with Apple to bundle ShockWave with every Internet-capable Macintosh, which should soon be every Macintosh that's shipped. We are going to announce a number of these agreements, the first one being Apple. You'll see agreements between us and Microsoft and AOL and others, which is really going to lead to the ubiquity of all the ShockWave plug-ins across the various browsers.
Many people have misunderstood the position of ShockWave in comparison to Java on the Internet. How or where do you see these two technologies in the future, and do you see them working together in any areas?
Java, I think, people have misunderstood alot because of the demos that Sun shows. It's always positioned as this interactive media language, and it's really not. It's a distributed C++-type programming language. What we may compete with in the future with products like ShockWave are tools that people build that output Java. Those tools can be built in Java, C, or C++ and output Java. We're starting to see some tools of that nature come into the market, early alphas and so forth.
We are also working on a Java tool within Macromedia. I think the positioning is very clear if one takes the time to understand it. Java is a programming language. It is targeted at programmers. And, like any language, it can do anything. Right now, for example, in the CD-ROM market, we never think of ourselves as a competitor with C, even though some people author titles in C, and some even use assembly for arcade-style games because they need the performance. But Macromedia has never said we are in direct competition with C. Our customers are creative professionals, graphic designers, videographers, animators, sound specialists, educators, trainers, multimedia producers, writers, and so on. The people that have the ideas, that image the applications, that create the media are our customers. Those people are not programmers.
To really differentiate between the two: One is an application, one is a programming language; one is targeted to the creative professionals or enthusiasts, the other is targeted to programmers.
