Brownstein, McCabe et al. pick up and go to prepress co. AGT

Much to the surprise of Kodak (and almost everyone else), the cream of the management, marketing and technical team that created and launched Kodak’s Photo CD technology has suddenly left Kodak and gone to work for the second largest color prepress company in the world.

The result will almost certainly be a significant acceleration in the adoption of Photo CD technology as a de facto standard for publishing and multimedia applications. Most likely, the “center of gravity” for Photo CD activity will move with the team from Kodak to its new home at Applied Graphics Technology (AGT).

AGT is the primary supplier of electronic prepress services and facilities management to major magazine publishers. Its customers include McGraw-Hill, Time Warner, Newsweek, Conde Nast and U.S. News & World Report, as well as the New York Daily News and several advertising agencies such as Campbell Ewald, Lintas and Saatchi & Saatchi. It was originally a subsidiary of U.S. News and was acquired by Fred Drasner when he acquired the publication.

AGT has formed a division, Imagenet, to “develop and market computer-based digital imaging products for the prepress, graphic arts and multimedia publishing industries, and for other markets where state of the art image storage, manipulation and retrieval is essential,” according to information released at the time of the announcement.

Brownstein at the helm. Scott Brownstein, the chief architect of the Photo CD system at Kodak, will head the division. AGT’s Murray Oles will serve as VP of technical sales and John Hafey as VP of system applications. The rest of the team will include Georgia McCabe (previously worldwide director of commercial CD imaging at Kodak), Surinder Dahiya (previously director of CD authoring and CD imaging in Kodak), and key members of the Photo CD technical development and marketing teams located in both Boulder, CO, and Rochester, NY. The team will continue to operate as it had under Kodak, with Brownstein and McCabe in Rochester and Dahiya and his technical team in Boulder.

Kodak’s Photo CD development team had been a somewhat ad hoc organization that included groups in both Rochester and Boulder. The original objective had been to develop the next generation electronic imaging product for the consumer market. However, it became increasingly clear to members of the team that the most important initial markets would be commercial rather than consumer.

Over time, they were gradually able both to extend the technology and to “open” it to allow others to begin building products around the originally proprietary Kodak specification. We doubt that this has been easy. Many people at Kodak still think that the company’s attention should be focused on promoting Photo CD in consumer markets. Others are worried about losing competitive advantage by making Photo CD specs public.

Still others (especially those who sell film and chemistry to graphic arts markets) are afraid of alienating their customers by promoting a technology that could well destroy the traditional color trade shop business.

However, the Photo CD team was able to get the company to commit to making Photo CD an open standard. The company announced this spring both the “opening” of Photo CD and some important Photo CD software products (see Vol. 2, No. 10/11, p. 26).

By this time, the effort required to operate as a guerrilla team within a large organization must have begun to wear. A number of team members were receptive to the concept of continuing their work in a new, more entrepreneurial environment.

AGT SAW OPPORTUNITY, NOT THREAT

From the beginning, Photo CD has looked like a “natural” for magazines. Several magazines have been experimenting with the technology. They reported at Seybold Seminars in Boston this April that the experiments have been satisfactory and they intend to adopt Photo CD. Others will surely follow. These same magazines are increasingly interested in multimedia products — and in Photo CD as a natural “bridge” from print into multimedia. Clearly, by setting itself up as the premier independent source for Photo CD applications and technology, AGT puts itself in a marvelous market position.

Drasner was remarkably prescient to see Photo CD as an opportunity rather than a threat — and remarkably fortunate to snare all the Kodak employees he needed to pull off his coup.

WHAT ABOUT KODAK?

We do not want to suggest that every competent person who had anything to do with Photo CD has now left Kodak. Of course Kodak will be able to continue its own Photo CD activities. However, we believe that having so many of the key people leave to form an independent organization committed to applying and promoting Photo CD technology should actually be very good for Kodak.

We have always felt that the big win for Kodak was having Photo CD become the de facto standard for digital still images. Now that the key specifications are becoming public, the Photo CD team can probably do more to accomplish this goal for AGT than it could working for Kodak.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR PHOTO CD?

Our confidence that Photo CD will become pervasive in publishing and multimedia has just gone up. Imagenet should have the right people in the right place with the right backing to drive Photo CD into the publishing market. If we were Kodak, we would help them and encourage them (and everyone else with similar ambitions) to do exactly that.

We hope that whomever Kodak now puts in charge of Photo CD will understand this and will continue the process of “opening up” Photo CD and encouraging everyone to use the technology. If instead it sees the “defection” as a threat and reacts defensively, it could either see effective control of Photo CD as a standard for commercial applications pass to AGT, or it could hold up widespread adoption of Photo CD sufficiently long to leave an opening for alternative digital image formats and standards to take over the market instead.

We are optimistic that rational self-interest will prevail.

Jonathan Seybold