February 12, 1996

Some new tools should make it far easier to put multimedia displays on the Web.

Sophisticated tools for multimedia publishing on the World Wide Web are racing to market.

Sybase Inc., a leader in data base software, will
distribute early versions of its new multimedia tools
via the Internet starting Feb. 20. And there are similar
products on the way from companies that include
start-ups like Net Objects Inc. and mFactory Inc., as
well as Steve Jobs’s tenacious Next Inc.

Though these software tools will range wildly in price,
they all perform the same basic functions. Common to all
of them is their reliance on what is called object
technology — a Lego-like approach to building software
that slashes the amount of time and expertise needed to
create a Web site featuring sound, animation and text.

The need for these tools is all too apparent. Most World
Wide Web sites are so ugly and dull, they actually make
multimedia CD-ROM’s look good. CD-ROM disks may be slow,
and the content may be of questionable value. But at
least most CD-ROM’s are colorful, noisy and somewhat
animated; most Web sites aren’t.

It’s not the Web’s fault. HTML, the original software
technology used to create Web pages, was designed to
display text and link pages — period. To make it
interactive, artists and entrepreneurs figured out
clever ways to enable Web pages to display rudimentary
animations and sound.

It looked like the Web would achieve a new level of
sophistication last year when Sun Microsystems Inc.
released an early version of Java, a programming
language that many believe may become the core of
multimedia applications on the Web. The catch is that
only experienced programmers can use Java. And hiring
programmers is a colossal expense and nuisance for
companies and artists with multimedia Web visions, who,
so far, have been able to use HTML themselves.

So this new generation of object-based tools is trying
to keep the Web a medium where anyone can be an author
or an artist without needing to be a programmer, too.

That’s one of the goals of Sybase
(http://www.powersoft.com). A few years ago, Sybase,
based in Mountain View, Calif., bought a small company
called Gain Technology that specialized in software
tools to build multimedia applications that could run
over networks.

Sybase’s initial target for Gain’s software was the
interactive television market, but it quickly shifted
its aim to the Web after noting the Internet’s
skyrocketing popularity. The resulting Sybase products
are tools for building multimedia Web sites.

One is called Media Splash. The other, called Media
Play, will be designed to operate with the latest
version of the Netscape Communications Corporation’s Web
browser software and enable users to interact with Media
Splash sites.

With not much more effort or technical knowledge than it
takes to create a computerized slide presentation, Media
Splash users can create sophisticated Web sites using
multiple media and various formats. Authors, using
simply point-and-click commands, can produce several
different types of animation as well as scores of other
effects.

The simplicity of Media Splash’s design was a deliberate
attempt to continue the ease-of-use tradition that began
with the Web’s HTML technology. “HTML took off because
physicists and humanities people could use it,” said
Raymond Drewry, a director of software architecture in
Sybase’s new-media group. Those who want to program
custom bits into their Web sites using Java or Media
Splash will be able to, Mr. Drewry said, but “you will
be able to do good stuff just by being human.”

Media Splash will be priced for humans as well: Sybase
is looking to sell the product for anywhere from $40 to
$250.

Low cost and ease of use are two of Media Splash’s most
powerful characteristics. But Sybase also appears to
have solved the critical technical problem of connecting
Web sites to information already residing in data bases
— a vital feature for catalogue companies and other
information and service providers who want to link their
Web pages to their back-office computer systems to
deliver customized services. The product that makes this
possible, called WebSQL, is also available free for user
testing from the Sybase Web site.

Other companies will be right on Sybase’s heels with
product offerings similar to Media Splash.

Mr. Jobs’s Redwood City, Calif.-based Next Inc.,
(http://www.next.com), for example, is preparing a line
of tools called Web Objects. These will range in price
from free (for beginning users) to $24,999 for a version
that allows developers to link corporate data bases to
the Internet.

mFactory (http://www.mfactory.com), a Burlingame,
Calif., company that already sells a $5,000 object-based
multimedia authoring tool called mTropolis, said that
beginning in April it would distribute a test version of
its webTropolis, which it eventually plans to sell for
$800 to $1,100.

A Web authoring and publishing system from NetObjects
(http://www.netobjects.com), of Redwood City, Calif., is
still in development, with no price or final shipment
date set for its system.

What does all this portend for that clunky old
multimedia medium, the CD-ROM? It has been long
predicted that CD-ROM’s — limited both by their storage
capacity and the fact that they cannot be distributed on
line — would fade away once the Internet was truly
ready for multimedia.

And if new tools like Media Splash and the others do
indeed transform the Internet’s World Wide Web into a
real medium for multimedia publishing, they could gut
the market for CD-ROM-based games, education and
entertainment titles.

The problem for Web publishers continues to be that
potential customers balk at actually spending money for
what they use on the Web. So far, at least a few
successful CD-ROM developers are still able to get
people to part with $30 or so for titles on disk.

So the larger question, the one that plagues the entire
on-line industry, continues to be this: Will Web
operators have the cash flow to keep their beautiful new
multimedia sites in business once they’ve snapped them
together?