Be careful what you wish for. Your wish might be granted. At this moment, many people involved in printing are wishing for, and spending time and money promoting, digital and specification standards for our industry. I wouldn't dare suggest that they do otherwise lest I be charged with denigrating the flag, motherhood and apple pie. What I dare to remind all well-intentioned parties is that there are tyrannies imposed by the deadly legacies that standards often become.
Prime example: the inch, foot, yard and acre are standards in the United States. Try, just try, to change to the metric measure standard in use by most of the rest of the modern world. We've tried and failed to change to a system that is far more effective. We are slaves of a legacy growing out of the measure of some ancient king's arm from nose to finger tip. We suffer a gallon of gas, a quart of milk, a pound of paper, miles per hour rather than kilometers, Fahrenheit rather than Centigrade temperature measures, and we have to instruct our calculators and computers to round off any conversion calculations beyond X decimal points.
Consider the operating system in use by 90 percent of the world's microcomputers. Back in 1980, Microsoft developed an operating system based on a measure of Bill Gates' arm from nose to fingertip or some such. By achieving a marketing critical mass, it became the de facto standard. Now we, and Microsoft, are stuck with it because of the thousands of applications, industries and businesses that are dependent on MS DOS and its bastard child Windows.
Besides "standards" and "legacies" there are other like words we use such as "paradigms," "cultures" and "metaphors." All of these terms deal with efforts to achieve a uniformity that, in time, becomes a constraint on change. Measures, operating systems, languages and theologies—all are efforts to impose disciplines on human behavior and thinking. In so doing they make it difficult to advance with improvements in technology and thought.
The paradigms—the standards—of a company make it impossible to change an established business in the face of disruptive innovation. So says Clayton Christensen in his "Innovator's Dilemma." Certain company behavior becomes so deeply embedded, it is incapable of radical modification. And so the company must perish.
Mergers and acquisitions frequently fail because the standards of two companies just cannot mesh. The tyranny of the legacy can be fatal. For this reason some printing companies have found greater success in building new plants than in attempting to unite cultures. The word frequently used to justify printing mergers is "synergy," meaning that the whole will be greater than the sum of the parts. Planned synergy in mergers more often than not results in one plus one equals 1.5. The standards of the two companies won't harmonize.
At the moment, we're observing a phenomenon called print e-commerce. An effort is being made by 100 or 200 intermediary tech companies to bring print buyers and printers together via the Internet. To do so, standardization between buyers and printers must prevail. The intermediaries offer a variety of translation methods and media to enable coherent interchange. A kind of vertical merger must occur with a synergy that makes purchaser and supplier more efficient by reducing costs of both.
To accomplish this idealized, mutual efficiency, the buyer must fill in forms that require structured, linear information for the computer server at the intermediary or at the printer as an RFQ—Request for Quotation. The RFQ is then transformed into digits that the printer, or a marketplace of bidding printers, can receive in their computers over Internet connections—linear, digital data. Received RFQ data is automatically estimated, priced and quoted.
Acceptances, change orders, proofs, approvals, production and delivery progress, invoices and payment drafts fly back and forth between customer and printer over the Internet—computers speaking the same digital tongue or an instantaneously translated language.
The clamor for standards of all sorts to achieve this synergy nirvana is mounting. Bill Gates, or Son of Bill, where are you now when we need you? Come achieve critical market mass and impose a de facto standardization between 50,000 printers and millions of print buyers. I've listened to the tapes of Seybold 2000, followed the threads of computer forums, walked the floor at Graph Expo 2000, and received the literature of the trade associations and committees. At the moment it's e-grope, not e-commerce for want of standards.
What am I saying? Am I asking for a legacy with all its implied constraints on change? Be careful what you wish for. If—a great big if—standards can be developed and if—another big if—those standards are widely adopted, they become a mixed blessing. They provide for a common digital language that will enable smooth, error-free communication between print buyers and printers. Those standards could reduce administrative and production costs for both buyer and printer by some order of magnitude. At the very moment they become effective, however, they're out of date. Those standards have become an impediment that blocks free adoption of new ideas and technology.
What to do? In the short term those wished-for digital standards will cut the costs of buying and producing printing. Productivity will increase. In the long term those very standards will be a drag on the use of the new wireless, voice-responsive, immensely more powerful computers now lurking just over the horizon. Those babies will require entirely different standards.
Do we really have a choice? We must survive in the short term because as Lord Keynes told us, "We'll all be dead in the long term." Change is the only constant. So bring on your digital standards. Let's have more immediate productivity. We'll use our second wish, Mr. Genie from the bottle, new standards!
—Roger V. Dickeson
About the Author
Roger Dickeson is a printing productivity consultant based in Tucson, AZ. He can be reached by e-mail at Roger@prem-associates.com, by fax (520) 903-2295, or on the Web at http://www.prem-associates.com.
- People:
- Bill Gates
- Places:
- United States