After 15 years of living and thinking about print and prepress workflows, it's over. Kodak is moving the software development to Israel. There will be a transition period. I'm not on the transition team.
After driving through the well-known early stages of grieving, anger and denial, I'm moving into acceptance, but not without a deep sense of sadness, and of loss, for Prinergy. I know Prinergy like I know my own kids - in fact they have spent their entire lives living with me envisioning, talking, travelling, selling, presenting, architecting, and tweaking Prinergy. It is part of our lives. It has been a singular focus since the fabled train trip in 1995 where I set out with Amos and Tim the top ten things it would have to do to change the prepress world.
While I am often referred to as the father of it, I never really liked the name Prinergy. Even the Creo CEO kept calling it "Printergy". Maybe I never let go of its original code-name, Araxi, which still adorns the code in various places. Even so, Prinergy has been the most significant project of my career (so far!) and I'm very proud to know that it has enhanced the lives of hundreds, if not thousands, of prepress operators and managers, and generated over $1B of revenue for Creo and Kodak over its lifetime.
For me, there will be many things lost. I am sad to lose the contact with the many customers I listened to, and sometimes argued with, but whose time and energy resulted in new features and priority of bug fixes, educating us as to their business problems. I'm sad to lose the breadth of knowledge I have gathered with my colleagues here in Burnaby, that we have built up. I am sad that I won't see the completion of what we expected to be a renewed Prinergy 6 vision at Ipex in 2010 - one that brings high speed digital and offset workflows together. And I will be sad to not come into the office each day with my second family: developers, engineers, testers and subject-matter experts who I have worked with for many years, meeting and sometimes exceeding our customers' expectations.
I'm not sure what the next thing to do will be, but as my Dad says, each time the universe closes one door, another opens.
My gratitude to our thousands of customers worldwide. My life is better for our partnership, I hope you can say the same.
/dave
6 comments:
Dave, YOU ROCK!!! You will always be the father of Prinergy. I liked ARAXI better also... You will always have a place in the print and plates forever more in our facility. You can now take over the world in whatever you desire to do. A pleasure as always! Till we meet again!
Dave I did not meet you, I am the owner of Reproflex3 in the uk.
We invested in Prinergy 3.0 with Stu Fox back in 2003... Prinergy set the foundations of what is pre press today, It was so far ahead of its time that no everybody got it. We got it and were very prowd to be a user as it gives us a platform that is set for the future. When I first heard of Kodak's purchase of creo we did momentary fear the worst, to be fair I'm suprised they have left the product along for so long, Dave thanks for creating a great product and I'm sure this is just the start for you! All the best for the Future
Andrew Hewitson
Dave, we bought our first Creo front end based solely on your list of what you wanted Prinergy to do, though Prinergy wasn't even available yet. We bought Platemaster, knowing full well that in less than a year we would replace it with Prinergy as soon as it came out. And we did almost exactly that. We've been a Prinergy shop since version 1.1, and it's been a huge part of this company ever since. So, regardless of all the other things I would like to say, I need to say thanks.
So thanks!
Barry
I still remember during the lead up to the launch of Prinergy at the Seybold Conference in San Francisco Agfa expressing concern that it would make their workflow efforts look paltry in comparison.
Quite sad how Kodak has vaporized most, if not all, of the folks whose vision and efforts generated the value for which they purchased Creo.
Good luck in your future endeavors!
- gordo
Dave, you always figured out what we needed before we needed it. Prinergy is a great product, thanks for all your help.
Hey Dave,
It appears that Kodak is getting rid of everyone that knows anything about how to build products and treat customers. Although as you well know Prinergy was never my FAVORITE product, I greatly respect and appreciate what you did at Creo, and later Kodak.
Keep us posted and best of luck!
Steve Johnson
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