All Of A Quiver
As the software sheriffs drive their cash cows to market, Claris and its merry men lie in wait to reap the booty. Paul Bray explains
While some of its rivals seem determined to make their name as well-known as McDonald?s or Coca-Cola, Apple?s software subsidiary Claris is content to let others do the talking.
?Every time Microsoft spends a dollar on marketing, it?s good for us, because it sends people down to the shops,? says Claris president Guerrino De Luca.
He believes that, while corporates may still follow the brand herd, company names cut no ice in the burgeoning home and small business markets. ?Software brands don?t matter,? he says. ?It?s like saying the reason Mission Impossible is successful is because it?s made by Warner Brothers. When I give presentations in the US, I?m introduced as the president of Claris Works because that?s what people know.?
Not that product marketing is cheap. De Luca says Claris spends five times as much on marketing as on research and development ? a hardware manufacturer might spend either an equal amount or twice as much. Even for a modest title like the integrated package Claris Works, it takes at least a year to produce a new release, including testing.
No one could call Claris a small software house. It turned over $236 million in the year to September 1996, up 42 per cent on the previous year. And it claims to be the world?s eighth largest vendor of applications for personal computers ? most of them Macs, which still account for 80 per cent of Claris? sales.
But it comes as no surprise to hear De Luca predicting a shake-up in a PC market in which he is still little more than a bit-player. This shake-up, argues Claris, will involve a change of focus from the hardware and operating system to the application software.
?The notion of platform will change,? says De Luca. ?Today it?s the Windows or Mac OSs. Tomorrow the platform will be the application. Any application with the ability to embed further functionality will become a platform.?
Embedding further functionality will go beyond knocking up macros or adding a template. De Luca believes firmly in componentware: the construction of software from independent but compatible components that may come from several developers.
The idea was first floated a few years ago, and assumed that individual users would exercise their democratic right and select their own favourite text editor, spell-checker, calculator, footnote editor or whatever, and meld them into a personalised whole, containing everything they wanted and nothing they did not ? in complete contrast to today?s bloated mainstream applications.
As well as being a nightmare for any company?s helpdesk, such a system would have about as much appeal to the average user as knocking up a traction engine out of old oildrums and cast-off guttering.
?The original idea that users would build their applications through components will always remain a dream,? concedes De Luca.
Instead, there may be two possible approaches. The first would see applications being assembled on the fly from components downloaded from a network or the internet. Both Java and Live Objects (Open Doc) will be implemented in Claris Works from the middle of 1997, though there are no plans to do this for Claris? other flagship product, the database File Maker Pro ? it would be harder to implement live objects here, says De Luca.
The alternative approach would be for complete applications like Claris Works to be sold as they are today, but tailored with an extra layer of functionality for specific occupations, pastimes or levels of experience. Thus there might be versions for teachers or solicitors, for pigeon-fanciers or club secretaries, for children or power users.
Claris has already taken a few steps down this road with its templates for education, small businesses and home users, with ready-made frameworks for order processing or science teaching. But if industry-standard components become common, the idea could spread, and most of the add-ins would be produced by third parties.
Many of these could be small independents, the kind of developers whose only ambition to date has been to eke out a living selling shareware, or to be bought out by a giant like Microsoft or Claris. These firms could either distribute their applets via the internet, or sign OEM deals with Claris and any other software publisher whose products conformed to the appropriate standards.
?Small software developers, that were supposed to have gone away, will come back,? predicts De Luca. ?That?s good for larger software houses like us because it keeps us on our toes.?
A key element in this vision of the future is the role of the internet as marketing vehicle, distribution mechanism, and all-round best thing since sliced bread. ?It?s hard to over-hype it ? everybody can?t be entirely wrong all the time,? enthuses De Luca. ?In California you?re not part of society if you don?t have an email address. Even the local bike shop is on the Net.?
According to Claris research, 40 per cent of Americans who buy computer equipment get their purchasing information from the Web. So does Claris, which admits to having no interest in Web browsers and the like, feel left out of the internet party? Not at all.
?The main business of the internet is publishing tools, and enabling access to the Net from basic desktop applications,? says De Luca. ?The browser is only an intermediate step. You will have integrated access from within your wordprocessor and spreadsheet.? This, of course, ties in with his belief that the application will become the platform.
De Luca points out that 60 per cent of Web authoring is done on the Macs, which is Claris? core market. Increasingly, he hopes, there will be demand for non-technical Web authoring tools, like Claris Home Page.
?As with DTP in the 1980s, publishers will become less and less an expert and more like you and me,? says De Luca.
Currently, though, it is the expert users that are setting the pace. ?The risk with the internet is that, instead of moving forward to simplicity and ease of use, it moves backwards towards complexity, because it?s driven by technical people,? says De Luca.
?Once you are in that space [of Web publishing and email tools], you have to go for market share. And to do that, you have to please the early adopters.? This, he adds, is both a threat and an opportunity for software publishers.
Standards like HTML are evolving so fast that applications have to go through new releases every few months. So instead of users having to shovel umpteen floppy disks or a CD-Rom into their PCs, or swallow a whole upgrade from the internet, De Luca expects that delivery will be incremental and automatic. That way, users will be able to elect to automatically receive partial upgrades as and when they appear.
Those most likely to raise a small cheer at this news are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). These have long been ignored by the software industry, despite the fact that, according to Claris, they form the fastest growing segment of the PC market ? growing at 30 per cent to 40 per cent, twice the overall rate.
De Luca says most users only use 15 per cent of the features in full-blown application suites, and that research by Dataquest shows SMEs prefer simple packages to full-strength applications like Word and Access.
The company?s bread and butter comes from relatively simple applications like Claris Works and File Maker Pro, though even Claris Works is a great deal more complex than it was a few years ago. Even so, De Luca says he was surprised to discover recently that more than half the company?s installed base consists of SMEs.
He seems to rather like his new-found role as Robin Hood to Bill Gates? Sheriff of Nottingham. ?Today, the majority of software is developed for large enterprise and expert users,? says De Luca. This, he argues, is partly because purchasing decisions have traditionally been taken by IT people or power users, who ordered software to suit their own requirements. Now that users are increasingly calling the shots and crinkling the cash, this could be set to change.
?Expert users and customers in large enterprises want more features,? he says. ?I?ve never met a customer who used a product at its maximum potential that didn?t ask: what if it could do this? If you listen to these guys, the whole thing just grows and grows. So in that sense the software has been tailored for this category of users, and now needs to be refocused towards someone else who doesn?t need 2,500 features on their screen.?
But despite the firm?s strong position in the SME market, it could still be a hard nut to crack. SMEs are technology followers rather than leaders, and rely a lot on the advice of consultants. Often the only way to market to SMEs is through consultants, so Claris puts a lot of effort into this, especially with its business partners ? a rather grand term for people who develop applications using File Maker Pro.
If the componentware idea catches on, these consultants could find themselves a nice niche writing Java or Live Object applets to slot into packages like Claris Works, though this would require more programming skills than merely writing File Maker scripts.
The prospect of all this upheaval does not seem to have disturbed De Luca?s equanimity. Asked what is his biggest regret, he opined that Claris could have taken more initiative in high-end Mac graphics three or four years ago. And as for his biggest regret, all he can muster is a passing reference to the increasing pace of technological change on the Net.
Only when asked about his hopes for the future does De Luca come to life again, saying that he hopes cross-platform technologies like Java and Live Objects take off, which should be to everyone?s benefit.
Everyone? Well, Microsoft?s Active X looks like an attempt to maintain control over the next phase of the industry, concedes De Luca. But then, think of all that marketing money Bill Gates invests in sending people down to the shops.