The ExScite community mourn the passing of a genius- Steve Jobs of Apple.
Apple has been the platform of choice in the graphic arts industry. As we all recall, Scitex has not diverted its skills and software innovation to the Mac platform, which quickly spelled the end for its workstation business.
One group at Scitex was trying hard to port the Scitex ingenuity into the Mac, under the leadership of Eli Israeli .
Ken Hurtubise was the application/marketing power behind the Scitex Visionary, and he posted this at ExScite members’ board:
“I had the opportunity to meet Steve Jobs a couple of times while I was at Scitex. His death reminded me of some of the “insanely great” products the Scitex team created with the Macintosh.
For those of you involved in the Visionary and VIP projects, here is some trivia you might be unaware of or forgotten:
– Scitex was the first company to attach a color printer and color scanner to a Macintosh. Even beating Apple’s own internal developments.
– For a time Scitex bought more high end Macs than any other company in the world.
– Color Macs from Apple started out being priced the same as a Sun workstation in Europe. We pushed them to have a more rational international pricing policy.
– At product launch, we sold 13 Visionary Beta sites for $80,000 cash up-front. That was important since Scitex was having cash flow issues.
– We wouldn’t tell anyone the price until the end of the introduction. One customer, who had to leave before the presentation was over, left us with a blank check and told us to fill it in and tell him the amount at the end of the day.
– With Quark, we created what became the concept of “extensions”. We taught Quark how to do quality text processing and they taught us how do some things in color on the desktop.
– I first offered Paul Brainerd (the president of Aldus, maker of PageMaker) the ability to work with Scitex on the Visionary concept. He turned me down, saying that they wanted to focus on the B&W office market instead. Years later he admitted to me that it might not have been the best decision he ever made.
– The original agreement between Scitex and Quark was a handshake agreement and a letter of understanding, handwritten on the front and back of piece of notebook paper at a Seybold conference.
– Adobe never wanted to do a software rip on the Mac. They only agreed to do it after we ported the Pipeline Technologies interpreter to the Mac and demoed it at a trade show”.
