MCRE very weak today on no news as far as I can find
(down - 7/8 on volume which is low but moderate for this
stock).
By the way, here are Kai's thoughts in complaints about
MCRE interface particularly with Windows, from the ZDnet
live chat line posted a while back. As an investor, I'm
not happy with it. Responding to a variety of complaints
his basic line is a) so what, were a young company and
can afford many mistakes, and anyway we're doing brilliantly
(b) We/I am so creative I can and should break all rules,
be nonstandard for its own sake (c) Windows is such rubbish
I dont care how my product works with it and anyway this is
the price one must pay to be nonstandard. Well, thats my
cynical impression. Kai, if your reading: this is totally
wrong. MCRE products should be like grey boxes; as boring
and conventional as other windows products on the outside
and interfacing with the usual features like recent file names
in the file menu etc, but wonderfully original once you open
them up. Its a matter of respecting the establishment if you
want their backing. Instead, you use the latter as an excuse
in the failings of the former.
Anyhow, this is just my personal impression. If MCRE can
keep up a stream of hot products then all can be forgiven. But
if they want to expand acceptance of exisiting products and perhaps
stop making losses, they need to grow up in their attitude.
But judge for yourself. Full text below.
Shahn
--------------------------------------------------
The following is from:
community.zdnet.com
Written by Kai Krause on Fri Aug 15 18:49:05 1997
To: all users
Message Number: 137426
I will go into a bit more detail over the next couple days, but lets go back to the tag line of this area here: the rough and raw
thesis thrown into the ether to you was: Breaking the Rules is the Essence of Progress Obviously thats poking a few people
and is stepping on a toe or two, and it was meant to. I don't mean by this the unfortunate early poster who had as his only
example of my work a limited copy of KPT running under Corel 7, yikes.... makes me shudder to think what that actually
looks like and how it runs. But even without the plea that it may not represent our current state or deeper intentions, the
argument I am making is not "lets tick of as many people as possible by not having hierarchical menus and general
compatibility with the "normal" world....'
I can fully understand that to some people the notion that they already learned where the File menu is means that not having
one is a nuisance. They will use the term "standards" in conjunction with Win95 or the MacOS and imply the positive being
compliance is 'easier' etc. And this may even be true. But to me it all is on an entirely different level. There always are those
that are driving a Yugo and simply are trying to get from point A to point B and others that happen to like cars which may
have a Miata or just a Citroen Deux Cheveux or maybe an XKE or XK8.... The point is that there are all those choices
and each one is unique and different. IF we all HAVE TO drive the same grey Honda its not much of a feature is it? Surely
it will make many things a lot easier to have a simple STANDARD imposed, but it also MAJORLY STIFFLES
INNOVATION
My entire crux of the idea was to say: trying to do it another way may not always be perfect or even succeed, but we
MUST try at least, SOMEONE MUST! We cannot simply let every Tom Dick and Harry feed back their favorite feature
and then after a year version 9 is released and its 110% of version 8.... all these functions are thrown together and hang off
of a bunch of menus, a slew of icon buttons wrap around icon bars on 3 screens around you and one wakes up on Untitled
1 and better have the manual ready to get anywhere. Many of these best selling programs are in their 8th or 9th year now
(!) and almost all were designed at a time when the average machine was a FRACTION of what you can now buy for a
grand at Office Depot and Staples. In other words: no one can tell me that Word 7 is the cats meow final answer to how
man and machine interface to bring your thoughts and ideas onto paper...it just can't be true! You may have read me
writing on these topics before and I said it many times: our kids will LAUGH about us and hysterically roll around the floor
when they see what we had to live with as "interfaces" today.
I am NOT proposing that ANY of my creations, not KPT or BRyce or Convolver or Soap or Goo or blablabla in
themselves represent ANY of the "real truth" or the "future way" on how it is done.... they were simply stepping stones for
us to go on our way over the last 5 years. NO more, no less. We started with about 8 people in 92 in L.A. made about a
million in sales reasonably soon after. Then we grew to 16 and 2M, 32 and 4 M, 64 an 8M, 128 and 16M, 256 and 32M
and now its roughly 330 people and 75M in sales give or take a few It was a wild ride and through acquisitions and merger
and going on Nasdaq in 95 we zigzagged through lots of stages, moved the whole company to Santa Barbara and
reinvented every time what we did. When Kai's Power Tools came out in 92, there were no plugins really, certainly no
proven market. And the investors wanted to know soon after how things are going. The answer was: ahh never mind KPT
we now have Bryce too!! and then when they asked again, we had Vector Effects and Convolver and Final Effects and
Goo and Soap and Amazon and MetaWorld and every time its the same dance " do you really think there is a market for a
program that messes up faces? is there a focus group that tells you this? what size is the current segment in face messing
software? who really has on their Christmas wish list 'I NEED A FACE MESSING PROGRAM NOW!!!'"
of course the answer is: there WAS no empirical data on any of it, I simply trusted my gut instinct that there is something
there.... if it moves ME and interests and excites me, I trust that I am my own best geek to know what might hop off the
shelves out there, (we ended up with over 3 Mio copies of Goo, globally, with OEMs...winning tons of awards and leading
the charts in some places still today)
NOw, that being said, I can tell you right now: the mathematical engine underneath Goo, amazing as it is, would in itself not
have sold ANYTHING if all we had was a bunch of dialogs and tool palettes and icon bars and single bit aliased text in
Chicago 12 with jaggies and radio buttons....the whole POINT of Goo was that it was almost like going into a strange
world, where you did not already totally knew what was going to happen. whereever you click, things move and blink and
animate and wiggle....everything was 24 bits with soft shadows on layers with organic shapes and unusual designs....
Parameters had curved sliders like gearshifts and unique little controllers and 3-D curved buttons with little built in lights,
glowing as you come close, lit when pressed, hovering above the image casting a soft displaced Gaussian shadow....live, so
you could even brush underneath them. All of that is PATENTLY non standard and breaks every damn rule in the WIn 95
or System 7 guidelines. The U-I police in either camp has me on their dart boards and on AntiChrist lists.... and I am
smirking all the way. Hell yeah! we WANTED to stir things up a bit and try a few new ideas!
Now in GOo it was a diversion for children, and so the happy rainbow buttons were appropriately playful and simple to
invite them to try things. It does NOT imply that "if Kai designed an entire OS it would all have goofy rainbow buttons all
over".... sigh!
I showed in Vector Effects that we can do an interface that is totally black and white, almost all pure text, no funny icons or
colors and it STILL has an elegance and style to it....( at least we like to think so... Clearly not everyone can share the
simple aesthetic choices we made, and if someone has a real aversion to using turquoise and terracotta , as we did in
Bryce...., well, thats unfortunate indeed: I would ultimately want some of these aspects to be user controllable anyway.
Our best work is still ahead of us, I do see all the previous designs mostly as stepping stones for us to grow. but when I
look at some of the more subtle ideas, starting with realtime animations and soft shadows to the gigantic 24 bit cursors of
Soap, I have never regretted that we broke some rules and look non conforming and different. It is MUCH harder to go
this route of course. If only the average user and the verbose critics had a real understanding just how much work it is to do
these creations.... and how hard it is to make things appear simple....
More and more software, CD ROMS, etc are now looking and feeling different, many of them following straight in our
footsteps, which is a lovely homage in a way, even if at times it has become complete apocryphal unawareness what
inspired these supposed new designs. My big problem now is that many of the hundreds of little tiny ideas are just not
protectable via patents or copyrights... its not the huge monstrous breakthroughs that make the progress, its tons of small
innovations that add up... I always cite the progression from the Ford Model A to a Mercedes S class as being the sum of
1000 steps. In that spirit we would like to contribute a few ideas and alternative approaches to how we interact with the
computer. and I maintain that it is MUCH harder doing so not in a bunch of fancy papers delivered in obscure academic
journals and junket conferences, but as real software that is easy enough for kids to play with and fun enough that they
would WANT to engage themselves and inexoensive enough that they can afford not to just pirate it but actually buy one (
i.e. $49...) and getting that out there in dealer channels on a global scale and make it not just a bunch of guys yappin' away
about and idea in some garage, but as a running serious company with hundreds of real humans making a living with it.... It
is not easy, but it is also quite exhilerating when it works. I thank all of you out there that have been supporting us in one
way or another. Without our hundreds of thousands of friends and customers we would simply not be here....
best wishes from our teams at MetaCreations Kai & friends |
