The vision, which Adobe CEO John Warnock and President Bruce Chizen rolled out at an analyst briefing in the company's, headquarters, is not exactly new: Tomorrow, we will need to publish to a variety of devices and media.
The future of publishing is collaborative; it will run over the Internet (one way or another); it is therefore delocalised in a nature; and it will change the way we will do our business. This is the next wave in publishing, it will bring momentous changes, and it has preoccupied software developers and technology managers for quite some time.
Only hinted at -- albeit broadly -- was Adobe's move toward an ASP model of software distribution to rival Microsoft's .Net. However, is proceeding with greater caution than the software giant.
The Adobe execs spent most of their time discussing the future of publishing and content distribution and describing how Adobe was going to make all its applications aware of the open standards that will compromise the backbone of all these cross-media efforts: XML, of course, but also standards such as WebDAV, which are at the heart of Adobe's InScope and InCopy products and will be integrated into all the major applications from the company.
ASP was mentioned only in connection with the Adobe Studio, the company's Web-based collaboration services for the creative industries. Adobe is probably doing the right thing by keeping a low profile when it comes to ASP distribution of software: Adobe depends far more than Microsoft on the revenue stream generated by its application-software division.
It's also clear that the creative markets are less ready to move to an ASP model than general office-productivity software. Even IT managers in publishing houses, who are watching this distribution model carefully, are in no hurry to wreak profound changes to their way of working, and Adobe is certainly aware of that fact.
So where do all these caveats leave the Network Publishing initiative -- especially since Adobe made no software announcements to back up its statements? Whatever its substance, it represents yet another sign that the publishing industry is changing and that Adobe wants to endorse a trend that has been manifest for quite some time.
But it will take some time before all these bold declarations are transformed into product reality -- and even longer before a significant part of the publishing market will have adopted them. However fascinating the vision of cross-media publishing may be, the changes it implies for publishers and content producers are enormous -- much more so than the switch to DTP tools a decade ago.
