Home | Third Culture | Digerati | Reality Club

JB: The Bulgarian connection?

CHOU: The biggest problem right now in the software industry is the cost of development, and if anything is going to kill our business, particularly on the consumer side, it's that it just takes too much money to build quality content. We understand that so a fundamental part of our business plan is how do we reduce costs to the extent that this makes it feasible as a business. The way that we've done that is to go offshore for our programming, which is one of the most important and difficult strategic decisions our company has made. My partner, Ludmil Pandeff, initiated the transition. He is of Bulgarian descent, and speaks the language. His father is involved in high-tech venture capital, and has been very involved in emerging business opportunities in Bulgaria. We took seven guys that we had in Dallas and reduced it to essentially one, and we started ten guys in Bulgaria, now there are 17, by the end of the year, 35.

JB: Good work. Six families in Dallas don't eat.

CHOU: We're part of the problem, right. Ross Perot would have a field day with us. We are the great sucking sound. But the sucking sound's coming from Bulgaria, not Mexico.

JB: What about Malaysia or India?

CHOU: India is almost too expensive as an alternative now. India, as far as programming goes, has become the First World rather than the Third World. The cheapest high-quality engineering is in Eastern Europe. An interesting story behind why all of this happened, and this is classic Marxist economics � when the Soviets were around, they parcelled out industries by satellite. Czechoslovakia was heavy machinery, Poland was whatever, and Bulgaria was software engineering. So Bulgaria is in a unique position, and it is less exploited than Malaysia and Indonesia and even Singapore and India right now in terms of programming. Plus there are fewer language issues, and they are closer. Even the few hours time difference that they're closer make a big difference.

JB: So you create product and then you go to Milia, which seems more like a flea market, compared to, say, the Frankfurt Book Fair. Isn't this a miserable way to market your products?

CHOU: The difference between Milia and Frankfurt is sort of a microcosm of the difference multimedia software business and the book business. Over the last 10 or 15 years, multimedia software, and software in general, has really not become a content business yet, despite what people will tell you. It's not the book business, it's not the record business. There is not the economics for the kind of diversity of content that there is in the book industry. The cost of development is too high, the market is too small. Unlike Frankfurt where every year there are tens of thousands of books and book proposals for people to look at, at Milia you basically have a rehashing of products that everyone already knows. And even when there are new titles they are basically rehashing ideas that everyone already knows, because people are trying to fit their products into these incredibly narrow vertical market niches, because there isn't the diversity of interest out there in order to stimulate real innovation. It's a real problem for the industry. I wouldn't have said this six months or a year ago, but I think that it seriously places in jeopardy the concept of being able to turn electronic media into a content-driven business. It may turn out that it's not possible, and all this goes by the wayside for another five years before the next great advancement comes, whether it's DVD interactive, or it's whatever. The industry is facing a real problem. That said, Milia is probably, ironically, the best show in the world right now, for this stuff. That's an indication of where our industry is right now.

At the recent Milia in February, we won the Award for Best Art and Culture title, which was an interesting experience. We won it for a title we developed with the Smithsonian Institution � the National Museum of American Art. Picture this: Milia is in Cannes and there's literally two thousand, people in auditorium. It's like the Oscars. Then the announcement of nominees and the winner. We were up against Microsoft, and Corbis, and several large European companies.

The announcement that we won the award was greeted by a cacophony of catcalls and boos throughout the hall. This continued as we approached and walked onto the stage. The French couldn't handle the fact that an American developer, and an American publisher, won Best Art and Culture with a title that was about American art. This was my moment, pissing off the French no end by winning their Best Art and Culture Award.

JB: Little did they know they were up against the Shanghai-Sofia-Cali content connection. Speaking of content....

CHOU: The use of the word content, and interactivity, and all these things, indicate the infancy of our industry. I always feel like a caveman. We talk about things with such large clunky terminology, but that's where our industry is right now. It's so simplistic that our business basically divides between engineering and content. Obviously that has absolutely no meaning or purposefulness in the book industry or the movie industry. On the other hand, if you think about the multimedia software industry, it's a little bit like the movie industry, if it were so early in the movie industry that you actually had to build your own cameras and film in order to make your movie. You would make distinctions between content and technology.

One of the big buzz words, along with content, and interactivity, and multimedia right now is engines. Everyone's talking about engines, and everyone means something completely different by the word. But the basic concept behind engines is that the industry is getting to a point where you cannot reinvent the technology every time you want to put out a title, whether it's on Leonard Bernstein, or dinosaurs, or whatever. You've got to figure out a way to standardize the substructure, so what you're concentrating on is the content. But that is fundamentally at odds with another one of the benefits of digital interactive multimedia, which is its unexpectedness. What people pay for is the fact that when you pop the CD-ROM into the machine, or you call up a Web page, you can't necessarily anticipate what its architecture is, what its capabilities are, what its functions are. Depending on how you look at it, that is considered a value. You would not consider it a value if every time you bought a book you'd have to figure out, do I read from left to right, do I read from bottom up or up down, or upside down, but that's part of what people are excited about with this new media. The question is how do you reconcile the desire for unpredictability in interface design, with the need for consistent underlying engines, so that publishers, like myself, can concentrate on content rather than technology. Nobody has solved that problem yet.

JB: Where are we in terms of engines?

CHOU: There are some standardized engines. In a funny way, Hypercard became a standardized engine, not necessarily because it became the basis for a lot of products, but because of the metaphors that it used: the idea of a stack; the idea that you could graphically see your path that you had taken and used in the program, you could step back through it. All of these concepts have become standard concepts within multimedia products in general. But there really hasn't been an engine which has standardized the publishing model for multimedia.

People are now trying to do that. For instance, Bob Stein is trying to do that right now, and he's been in the business of trying to create tool kits that would underlie publishing efforts. But no one has achieved it yet. I think it's really a Holy Grail, and I think there's a tremendous opportunity for someone who's able to figure it out.

If there is something that holds the most promise for being an engine, it's probably the Web, because the Web has become a highly standard publishing vehicle that's used as much by someone at home as it is by a major publisher, and it's fairly finite in terms of what the possibilities are.


Previous | Page 1 2 3 4 5 | Next