🚀 go-pugleaf

If you look at the interaction of technology and industry for the past few
hundred years, you will see a recurring theme. A new technology gets
invented. The in-place industry applies that technology to automate what
they are currently doing. This is often inefficient, as the new technology
is often better applied by changing the fundamental premises of the
industry. Gradually new companies grow up, which use the new technology in a
different way, and if it is more cost-effective, then the new industry
drives the old one out of business.

The "obvious" application of computer technology to the graphic arts
industry is to give them computer systems that mimic the way they have been
doing business--wysiwyg systems. Naturally they will prefer this. A
non-obvious approach is to eliminate the graphic arts industry, applying the
new technology to make 80% of its work force redundant. Then it doesn't
matter what they think.

I claim that, for a wide range of publications, the traditional graphic-arts
industry approach of cutting, pasting, and wysiwyg systems simply cannot be
competitive with more software-intensive approaches such as embedded-command
systems. You will be trading one programmer for 4 graphic artists.

At the moment we are in a transition phase. The graphic arts industry is
discovering computers, and they are molding them in their own image, taking
the things that they have done by hand since the invention of cold type and
putting them isomorphically onto the computer. Simultaneously, however,
thousands of businesses are discovering that they don't NEED the graphic
arts industry. With simple computer tools they can achieve their end
results--the publication of books or newsletters or catalogs--without
graphic artists. If history serves as any guide, then in half a generation
the traditionalist approach will no longer be competitive and will have to
pull out of those markets completely.
-- 
	Brian Reid	decwrl!glacier!reid
	Stanford	reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA