In the first place, the name is wrong. It's not multimedia. Multimedia means combining media, like pasting a picture in a word processing document, or like USA Today. Words and pictures together, that's one medium plus another, voila, multimedia. Other media can get into the act, but words and pictures are enough. And words and pictures together aren't new.
This new thing that is being called multimedia, this convergence of television and video and sound and audio CD technology with computer technology and CD-ROM, is not about just any media. It's specifically about dynamic media like sound and video: media that include a time dimension. Even the "multi" part has to do with time: For these new media, integration really means synchronization.
Apple has recognized this time-dependence in naming its new media product, QuickTime. QuickTime is a set of tools for compressing, storing, and synchronizing tracks of dynamic data. As part of QuickTime, Apple has defined an extensible, cross-platform dynamic data file format called "movie." Movies can have tracks of time-dependent data of various types. Currently, the data type includes two kinds of tracks: video and sound. More are planned.
Maybe the term multimedia will go away. Apple's press releases for QuickTime show a reticence with respect to the term, and there's a lot of talk at shows and in the press about Desktop Video (DTV?) and Desktop Presentations (DTP2? -- hmm).
In the second place, the name is still wrong.
It's probably not going to be desktop anything. The adjective desktop implies something about the market for dynamic media products that just ain't so. Look at the machines: At the low end, Commodore's CDTV is only the precursor to low-cost home media machines from Apple and PC vendors, while the high end includes relatively expensive studio-quality MIDI and video editing equipment. These are tools for the home or for the studio, not for the desktop. Look at the definition Microsoft has put forth for a "multimedia PC": a 10-MHz 286 or better, 2-Mbyte RAM, 30-Mbyte hard disk, VGA, internal CD-ROM drive, and an audio card that meets certain specifications. A 286? These are not the specs for a desktop computer for the 1990s; this is a definition designed to cover home media machines and to scale up to studio-quality equipment. Desktop business machines are in there somewhere, but I don't believe that business presentation software was uppermost in the minds of the authors of this definition.
Even if board-meeting presentations of the 1990s are spiced up with video and sound, the real market for dynamic media is probably not some extrapolation from desktop publishing, but rather an extrapolation from the current video market. Some people are even starting to talk about dynamic media development as The New Hollywood.
In the third place, if that's the right name, God help us.
What would The New Hollywood produce? The old Hollywood produces movies, entertainment, mind candy. Can this really be where the dynamic media trend in computer technology is heading? Will content producers dominate and tool producers become something like special effects artists? Will productivity give way to what Apple calls "user experience" in judging products?
Yeah, probably to some extent all of this will happen, and would happen even without dynamic media, simply because content-based products are now viable. CD-ROM is the first economical delivery medium for content producers. Lotus Marketplace didn't fail in the marketplace; there were a lot of small businesses that wanted that product, and there are lots of customers for other content-based products. Data is eminently marketable.
Sure, databases, but entertainment? Yeah, that too. It's no deep insight that the way to get the computer into the home was to connect it to the television set, and now that's happening. It shouldn't be surprising if what gets produced is somehow connected to TV fare, too. But while the public's need for entertainment products seems to exceed its need for spreadsheets, the failure rate of big-budget movies suggests that it's difficult to gauge the public's need for any particular entertainment product in advance. It's a highly subjective field of dreams.
Developers of business software have had the luxury of knowing that their products can increase the user's productivity. Ditto for compiler vendors. Increased productivity is a legitimate pitch that speaks to the bottom line. But developers working in The New Hollywood may not have that luxury. Buying into that market may be like hearing voices in a cornfield and building a ballpark.
If you build it, they will come. Well, maybe. Now it looks like we're building The New Hollywood. Who will come to the opening?
Michael Swaine editor-at-large
Copyright © 1991, Dr. Dobb's Journal