> Creo stopped working when it acquired a rival that had more employees than it had
Huh. That'd make sense. From the outside, Creo Scitex looked like an unstoppable dreadnaught.
Creo acquired ScenicSoft in 2002. Alas, I saw no evidence of economic thinking.
Whoever was in charge of software was proud of having never canceling one of their ~dozen products. Me asking if there was a P&L for any of them was among my top 20 most brave/stupid work related selfowns.
They did cancel Color Central in short order. (Payback?) Basically CUPS with features for print manufacturing and a purdy UI. Super boring, but a necessary product. Although no longer affectionately known as Cash Cow (the internal code name Illumious had given it), it still had a huge installed base, had steady revenue (upgrades), and maintenance was on auto-pilot.
About a year later, Creo licensed Color Central's biggest competitor. (Sorry, forget that company and product name. I remember that they were a great team though.)
Rowan's UpFront was part of the ScenicSoft acquisition. Advanced print manufacturing planner. Pretty much unparalleled. A true diamond in the rough.
Further, I had invented a novel imposition engine for bookwork. Specify all the sizes and (crucially) the desired binding -- voilá, out comes a Preps template production plan. (Preps was ScenicSoft's flagship product, the gold standard for print imposition.)
Automating bookwork planning was the holy grail. The long sought replacement for Preps' very complicated, very necessary template editor.
I don't think the Creo people understood what they had. They were so focused on their (awesome) digital plate stuff and adjacent. Like most, they probably treated the bindery as an afterthought.
I forget how Creo managed to let Rowan slip thru their fingers. But don't worry, he did it all again and earned a pretty good exit the second time around.
--
Whatever Creo's shortcomings, the president and owner of ScenicSoft totally failed. After many rounds, he managed to negotiate Creo's initial $70m offer down to $9.5m. So saavy.
Interesting. I worked on output devices (and some very specialized ones at that) so I didn't really see a lot of the "software" side of the business. But I have seen some "not invented here" and rivalry between the Creo and Scitex teams. Part of the problem there was actually maintaining parallel products and teams that targeted the same markets.
Acquisitions are just tough. There were good people with good intentions and teams did try to work together. I spent some of my time trying to bridge the teams, with some success. What was missing is a good idea of how to restructure things to eliminate the duplicate efforts which is super tough when you're also dealing with large install bases. There were a few technical attempts to bridge the architectures and bit and pieces from "Creo" machines found their way into "Scitex" machines.
Huh. That'd make sense. From the outside, Creo Scitex looked like an unstoppable dreadnaught.
Creo acquired ScenicSoft in 2002. Alas, I saw no evidence of economic thinking.
Whoever was in charge of software was proud of having never canceling one of their ~dozen products. Me asking if there was a P&L for any of them was among my top 20 most brave/stupid work related selfowns.
They did cancel Color Central in short order. (Payback?) Basically CUPS with features for print manufacturing and a purdy UI. Super boring, but a necessary product. Although no longer affectionately known as Cash Cow (the internal code name Illumious had given it), it still had a huge installed base, had steady revenue (upgrades), and maintenance was on auto-pilot.
About a year later, Creo licensed Color Central's biggest competitor. (Sorry, forget that company and product name. I remember that they were a great team though.)
Rowan's UpFront was part of the ScenicSoft acquisition. Advanced print manufacturing planner. Pretty much unparalleled. A true diamond in the rough.
Further, I had invented a novel imposition engine for bookwork. Specify all the sizes and (crucially) the desired binding -- voilá, out comes a Preps template production plan. (Preps was ScenicSoft's flagship product, the gold standard for print imposition.)
Automating bookwork planning was the holy grail. The long sought replacement for Preps' very complicated, very necessary template editor.
I don't think the Creo people understood what they had. They were so focused on their (awesome) digital plate stuff and adjacent. Like most, they probably treated the bindery as an afterthought.
I forget how Creo managed to let Rowan slip thru their fingers. But don't worry, he did it all again and earned a pretty good exit the second time around.
--
Whatever Creo's shortcomings, the president and owner of ScenicSoft totally failed. After many rounds, he managed to negotiate Creo's initial $70m offer down to $9.5m. So saavy.