Lessons from 25 Years of Digital Publishing

Early Days

25 years ago Apple and a hand­ful of part­ners ignited the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing rev­o­lu­tion. I was there, a senior mem­ber of Apple’s pio­neer­ing team, along with vision­ar­ies and change agents from Adobe, Aldus, Quark and oth­ers. Our work laid the foun­da­tions for dig­i­tal con­tent and pub­lish­ing, key mile­stones on the road to the Web, social media, blog­ging, and other 21st cen­tury communications.

Ide­al­ists and vision­ar­ies, we would be providers of “enabling tech­nolo­gies” that would spawn new forms of dig­i­tal con­tent cre­ation, expres­sion, deliv­ery and con­sump­tion. We would act as cat­a­lysts. Change agents, advo­cates, ambassadors.

We pas­sion­ately believed that these changes would ben­e­fit soci­ety as a whole. After all, Apple’s cor­po­rate mantra at the time was “Chang­ing the way peo­ple work, learn, live and play.”

But we would not have pre­dicted that this trans­for­ma­tion would take 25 years to unfold. Nor how dis­rup­tive it would be to every­one in the con­tent ecosys­tem. And while we rou­tinely used email (AppleLink) to com­mu­ni­cate with part­ners and co-workers, we did not fore­see the emer­gence of the Inter­net. We knew dig­i­tal con­tent would be trans­for­ma­tive, but not how the changes would unfold.

Early Notions about Con­tent and Dig­i­tal Publishing

By 1989 we rec­og­nized that con­tent, once cre­ated or cap­tured in dig­i­tal form, could be expressed and viewed across mul­ti­ple media types. We had some fuzzy notions about dig­i­tal assets, although no way to man­age dig­i­tal con­tent. Inter­nally we used words like “con­tent,” “mul­ti­me­dia,” and “new media.” Most of the world thought we were crazy at the time… Includ­ing exter­nal mar­ket­ing ser­vices providers, who fought our attempts to inte­grate and align their con­tri­bu­tions to our inte­grated mar­ket­ing campaigns…

Here’s a con­cept dia­gram excerpted from an inter­nal Apple mar­ket­ing plan, circa 1989. Our first attempt to pop­u­lar­ize the idea that con­tent could be cre­ated for mul­ti­ple uses. This mar­ket­ing plan was shared across the core mar­ket­ing team, includ­ing trusted third party developers.

Lay­ing the Groundwork

Early cus­tomer feed­back sug­gested that open-minded, cre­ative indi­vid­u­als would eagerly seize upon these new capa­bil­i­ties as a pow­er­ful means of self-expression. And that enter­prises, edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions and non­profit orga­ni­za­tions would some­day fol­low suit. Once the early adopters had worked out all the kinks…

We hoped our ideas would some­day be embraced, but rec­og­nized that our strate­gic mar­ket­ing chal­lenge entailed cat­e­gory cre­ation, mar­ket devel­op­ment, and on-going evan­ge­lism. Some­thing few com­pa­nies can afford to do on their own, so we tack­led it with the help of “co-marketing part­ners” like Aldus, Adobe, and even­tu­ally HP, Microsoft and other like-minded developers.

Apple invested mil­lions to asso­ciate its brand with all forms of cre­ative expres­sion, ini­tially under the tagline “The Power to Be Your Best.” (TV spot via YouTube.)

While Apple’s ad agency pro­duced high con­cept TV and print ads, our mar­ket­ing team invested in more prag­matic tac­tics to per­suade cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als and wannabe’s that dig­i­tal con­tent cre­ation was pos­si­ble. We knew we had to demon­strate and prove that both processes and results would be appro­pri­ate for many use cases and bud­gets. So we spent heav­ily on suc­cess sto­ries, chan­nel mar­ket­ing and event mar­ket­ing, to bring these con­cepts to life. Mar­ket­ing via “proof points”… We cel­e­brated our early adopters as heroes.

The first image above is the cover of a late 1980s sales tool for Apple’s US resellers. We knew that “see­ing is believ­ing,” and wanted to empower our deal­ers to show poten­tial cus­tomers actual sam­ples of what was then state-of-the-art for dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing. This was prob­a­bly Apple’s most pop­u­lar ever sales tool, one I saw chained to deal­ers’ coun­ter­tops years later. (This book should prob­a­bly be archived in the Smith­son­ian, given its impor­tance to the early dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing revolution…)

The sec­ond image comes from the inter­nal mar­ket­ing plan for the “Expres­sions Cam­paign,” aimed at what we called “fre­quent com­mu­ni­ca­tors,” includ­ing pro­fes­sion­als. Our first attempt at think­ing about some of the ideas that Razor­fish calls “nim­ble content.”

Tagged as: Adobe, Aldus, Apple, desktop presentations, desktop publishing, digital content, origins of digital publishing

Revised on June 16, 2010