Cloners get licenses revoked

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Nov 1, 1997 by Steve Wilson

Though the effects of Apple Computer's decision to end Macintosh cloning remain to be seen, the move has raised fears that increasing numbers of users and software developers will abandon the system used by a majority of magazine publishers.

Following increased friction with clone manufacturers, the company bought clone leader Power Computing Corp. on September 2 and announced that it would not expand its licenses with other clone makers. Apple said that, in the two years since licensing was initiated, the cloners have been paying too little for licenses and have been funneling customers away instead of attracting new users.

Without access to that now-forbidden fruit, the second-largest clone maker, Motorola, announced that it would stop making Mac machines at year's end. Third-place Umax Data Systems worked out an arrangement with Apple to gain limited access to Mac technologies, such as OS 8.

It's viable, but for how long?

Under its new arrangement, Power Computing will provide hardware and warranty service to its customers indefinitely and continue manufacturing Mac-compatible computers bearing the Power name until the end of this year. The company will hand over Mac OS support for Power owners to its new owner. Apple says the sale, rumored at $100 million, will give it access to Power Computing's highly developed direct marketing channels, and some analysts note the gains to be had from eliminated competition and Power's high-end technology, which has given Apple a run for its money. Others predict that the decision will hasten Mac desertion, not just by users, but by software developers as well.

"As a print platform, [Mac] is still viable, but what about all of those developers who make those extensions for Quark?" asks Eve Asbury, vice president and director of digital and print production at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising. "Why should they develop for both platforms if the Mac platform isn't going to make sense to them financially? I just think this whole strategy is the kiss of death."

According to San Jose, California-based Dataquest, a market-research firm, cloners took over a 10 percent chunk of the Mac market in 1996, but their sales sagged along with Apple this year. Chris Willis, art director of 40,000-circulation Hour Detroit, joined that percentile when he purchased two of Power's PowerTower Pro 225s in January. He says the $4,500 machines, with 604E processors running at 220 MHz, 80 to 130 MB and graphic accelerator boards, were a more powerful and less costly alternative to the $6,000 to $7,000 Mac Tower equivalent.

Although his system is protected under the new agreement, Willis says he considers Apple's decision to be "a real betrayal" that will put his Mac loyalty to the test. Of course, he won't have to upgrade again for a few years. For the time being, he says, he'll wait and see what fate holds for Apple, a future that is anyone's guess.

"I'd hate to give up on it, but honestly, right now, I'm kind of upset about the whole thing," Willis says. "It's still going to be a business decision in the end, that's what drove the decision in the first place, and that's what will drive it in the end."

RELATED ARTICLE: BRIEF notes

Banta covers customers' assets

Banta Corporation opened its Digital Content Management Solutions Center this summer, joining the movement of printers and prepress houses that are offering digital asset management for clients. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based center, with 50 employees, was created to help customers archive and repurpose images, QuarkXPress pages and other data either from their offices or through Banta.

Generally, there has been little difference in the cost and features of asset management offered by printers, service bureaus and packages like Canto's Cumulus and Archetype's MediaBank (see Folio:, July 1, 1997). Paul Beyer, director of the center's Solutions Lab, says Banta offers a few unique services magazine publishers could benefit from, such as performance ratings for each piece of content derived by wedding business data with files. But this $200,000 higher-end functionality (lower price tiers for smaller, less powerful systems will be introduced in coming months) hasn't attracted any magazine customers yet. Granted, only 4.4 percent of respondents to FOLIO:'s desktop publishing trends survey (Folio:, October 1, 1997) said that they used asset management in the first place. As more publishers become digital asset management converts, the question will be whether to one-stop-shop with their printers or service bureaus, or set up their own systems with a package.

Tom Reale, production systems analyst at Miller Freeman in San Francisco, went the home-grown route with Cascade's MediaSphere. He says managing 65 percent of the content from 80 titles is a job best kept within the company instead of done over a network. "Even if we could do it online [with a printer or prepress house from the Miller Freeman office] ... our issues are simply too large," he says. "It's a long way off before you can easily put 800 to 900 MB across a link in a time-efficient manner during a production cycle."