August 1999, Vol. 10, No. 8
The Fifth Wave
Newspaper systems move beyond the straight-jacket of off-the-shelf
At first, the type was hot; then it was cold.
These are what are referred to as the first two waves of publishing technology: hot metal, followed 400 years later by cold type.
The next wave of publishing technology brought the proprietary publishing systems of the 1970s and ’80s -- you remember them, the Atexes, SIIs and CSIs. These systems were not just the providence of newspapers, but used in magazines and catalog publishing as well. (They say that an Atex system was used at the Central Intelligence Agency to write up top secret reports.)
These systems were specialized, and they were expensive.
Toward the latter part of the last decade, the Fourth Wave took off. Christened by the editors of the Seybold Report on Publishing Systems, the Fourth Wave was defined as open systems -- off-the-shelf hardware and software, laced together to build a publishing system.
A corollary of the Fourth Wave was that system suppliers would split into two camps: the software developers and the system integration firms.
And it was pretty cool to watch the leviathan systems providers attempt to remake themselves in the mold of the Third Wave. SII was poised to build a complete pagination and imaging environment that ran on its proprietary Ring operating system in 1987 (it even had an order for one); by 1989, Ring was gone and the company was talking about putting the functionality of a Coyote into a program running OS/2 (and we all know where OS/2 went).
So it became the job of the smaller, more nimble companies to provide true Fourth Wave solutions -- Dewar Information Systems (later acquired by Atex), Advanced Publishing Technologies, Advanced Technical Solutions, Agile Enterprise, CompuText, Publishing Partners and many more. Unfortunately, the integration piece really never took off (only two firms thrived in the niche -- CNI Corp. and a division of Digital Equipment Corp. that is now part of Compaq Computers).
A few months back the Seybold Report ran a piece on CCI Europe and its dramatic sales efforts in the last 24 months (Usa Today, Washington Post, Seattle Times, Orange County Register). An interesting sidebar with the article basically danced around the notion that the Fourth Wave was dead (without, incidentally, using the phrase "Fourth Wave").
The conundrum for the Seybold writers and editors was that the CCI Europe system -- which is powerful and successful -- uses a great deal of what in an unenlightened time might be called "proprietary software." The system is based on off-the-shelf hardware and operating systems -- initially deployed on Sun workstations and servers running the Solaris variant of UNIX, the products are now also available for Intel-based workstations and servers running Windows NT -- but much of the software is written by CCI (it does use a few off-the-shelf software components).
Conversely, many newspapers are being successfully published on largely off-the-shelf software from companies like APT, ATS, Agile, PPI and others.
How do you reconcile the fact that both types of products are thriving? The Fifth Wave.
Taking liberally from both the Third and Fourth waves, the Fifth Wave states: "Use the appropriate technologies."
Bigger papers -- those with complex needs, and/or significant cash flow -- need and want industry-specific software and features. They need a CCI (or a Unisys, or Atex’s new Omnex).
Smaller papers -- those with simpler problems to solve and a less hearty balance sheet -- can survive on more generalized software.
There are companies like Digital Technology International that will harness a wonderful balance of off-the-shelf and proprietary -- DT’s latest version of its 'Speed products are a perfect example, with their reliance on Adobe’s InDesign and Sybase. But there will be companies that offer products throughout the off-the-shelf versus proprietary spectrum.
And that’s the really important aspect of the Fifth Wave: It is not didactic. As long as the suppliers provide reasonable price versus performance ratios, there are no rules.
The beauty of a Fifth Wave system is that it is every system -- there are no losers.
-- David M. Cole
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From THE COLE PAPERS, August 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.