Open source software: where it came from and why it is important

The InnovatorsIn his new book The Innovators, Walter Isaacson reviews the impact of the intermingling of the Internet and the personal computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He writes, “This merger of the personal computer and the Internet allowed digital creativity, content sharing, community formation, and social networking to blossom on a mass scale.”

Indeed, in the ten years from 1984 to 1994 the convergence of these two previously separate technologies changed the world. The integration of the mouse driven and graphical desktop with web browsing and email communications was the beginning of a transformation in human activity on a mass scale that continues to this day. Without this accomplishment we would never have reached the wireless, mobile, touch and social world we now live in.

Isaacson’s book shows how the gifted and creative innovators that brought the digital revolution into being also collaborated with each other and across generations; their genius and creative accomplishments could not have been achieved without teamwork.

Isaacson explains the social and cultural environment of that time which nurtured the social element of the digital transformation, “For the birth of the digital age, this included a research ecosystem that was nurtured by government spending and managed by a military-industrial-academic collaboration. Intersecting with this was a loose alliance of community organizers, communal-minded hippies, do-it-yourself hobbyists, and homebrew hackers most of whom were suspicious of centralized authority.”

Most people are familiar with the contributions of men like Steve Jobs of Apple, Bill Gates of Microsoft and Marc Andreesen of Netscape during those early years of the convergence of the PC and the Internet. The competition and legal battles for domination of the new technology markets—with billions of dollars at stake—are now legendary chapters of American business history. As much as collaboration was an organizational prerequisite for the age digital innovation, the market also drove antagonisms that split people and firms apart from one another.

Apple, for example, famously launched (1988) and ultimately lost (1994) a lawsuit against Microsoft over the manner in which Windows 2.0 copied features—the “look and feel”—of the Macintosh desktop. Even something as universal as the Trash Can became a source of contention.

Later, the US government initiated (1998) and won (2000) an antitrust case against Microsoft—on behalf of competitors including Netscape—that forced the unbundling of Internet Explorer (which Microsoft was giving away free of charge at the time) from the Windows operating system. Just at the moment when the seamless integration of web browsing with the underlying operating system would be the next logical phase of development, competitive pressures drove these elements of the computing experience apart from one another.

Open source software

Although perhaps less legendary, there was another no less significant group of innovators who made major and lasting contributions to the digital age during the same ten-year span (1984-1994): the creators of open source software (OSS). Their approach to digital technology development was based entirely upon a collaborative model. Although competitive and strategic differences did emerge among them, the open source community today is a central and growing force in the computer software industry.

Open source software is computer software whose source code is available publicly by license from the copyright holder. As opposed to closed source software—where the source code is hidden and unavailable for modification by anyone but the copyright holder—open source software encourages users and the public as a whole to study, copy, modify and distribute the source code to anyone and for any purpose.

Open source software licensing maintains the copyright ownership of the original author and frequently has obligations for licensees. For example, an open source software license may require that modifications to the source code be distributed in open source form or an attribution of the original author must be included in the documentation or program being distributed.

Open source software development relies upon the collaboration of a community of thousands of programmers. In OSS programming, the mostly volunteer developers work independently and use the Internet to collaborate on solving problems and fixing defects. The social networking aspect of OSS development has helped produce reliable, professional quality software at low cost and at an accelerated pace.

Richard Stallman, GNU & the Free Software Foundation

Richard Stallman in 2007 and the GNU logo
Richard Stallman in 2007 and the GNU logo

Richard Stallman—the Harvard educated hacker and activist—is recognized as an originator of the free software movement, a precursor to open source software. In September 1983, after leaving his job at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, Stallman launched the GNU Project with the aim of giving computer users the freedom to use and modify software. For Stallman and his community of supporters, the term “free” does not mean free of charge; it is free in the sense that it is unencumbered by the requirements of commercial and proprietary software licensing such as with Microsoft Windows and UNIX (GNU is a recursive acronym that stands for GNU’s Not UNIX).

In October 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation as a non-profit organization to promote the universal freedom to study, distribute, create and modify computer software. With the tongue-in-cheek methodology of a radical, Stallman wrote the GNU General Public License and advanced the concept of the “copyleft” (as opposed to the copyright) which gives everyone the right to do what they like with software with the exception of placing restrictions upon others.

An early product of his free software project was Stallman’s GNU Emacs text editor launched in 1984. Emacs has many of the features found in commercially available word processing software combined with a high degree of customizability including the addition of community developed plug-ins and extensions. In the 1980s, these were new concepts in PC software. GNU Emacs continues to be developed today and is up to version 24.4. Some estimates put the worldwide Emacs user base in the hundreds of thousands.

While Stallman’s work was pioneering, it came upon a dilemma: GNU free software programs were being written to run on proprietary operating systems, i.e. UNIX, MS-DOS, MacOS, Windows, etc. Although he tried, Stallman was unable to develop a GNU software kernel, the heart of the computer operating system that manages the exchange of data between applications and the central processing unit (CPU).

Linus Torvalds & Linux

Linus Torvalds and the Linux logo
Linus Torvalds and the Linux logo

In October 1991 Linus Torvalds—a Finnish-American software engineer—released the first computer operating system assembled under an open source software development model. Torvalds was 21 years old. He called his system Linux (a contraction of Linus and UNIX) because it had a UNIX-like kernel. Torvalds wrote the original Linux code on an Intel 386 PC clone while he was living with his family in an apartment in Helsinki.

After he completed ten thousand lines of code, Linus Torvalds elected to offer his product publicly instead of trying to market it privately. Torvalds’ decision was influenced by a Richard Stallman lecture that he attended with a friend. Torvalds used the GNU General Public License to launch Linux officially in 1992 because he thought that letting hackers around the world help with the source code would lead to a much better end product.

The release of the Linux kernel produced a massive response which became a model of peer-to-peer collaboration. Within a year, there were tens of thousands of Linux collaborators all over the world working on bugs and developing additional capabilities such as a graphical user interface and networking capabilities. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds maintained his role as the leader of the Linux development process.

Although Torvalds’ Linux was released with the spirit of Stallman’s free software licensing, there were differences between the two men. The separation of Linux from the pure GNU model emerged as Torvalds and others started to refer to their product as open source software and emphasized the development model more than the absence of proprietary or business interests. While Stallman believed that software must be free of all private and corporate interests, Torvalds took a more pragmatic view that as long as the source code remained open, other things could be done with the products that do not follow all of the GNU principles.

Computer platform operating system market share (from Wikipedia)
Computer platform operating system market share (from Wikipedia)

Today, the Linux operating system has been ported to more computer platforms—including the world’s largest supercomputers—than any other. Although Linux is used on less than 2% of desktop and notebook computers, it is the leading operating system on servers and the Linux kernel is the basis of Android, the most widely used OS on smartphones and tablets. There are many examples of open source software being used widely by the public every day, Mozilla’s Firefox browser and Wikipedia’s internal wiki technology among them.

While books on the history of computer technology tend to omit it, to his credit Walter Isaacson in The Innovators devotes a section of his chapter on software to Stallman and Torvalds and free and open source software. Isaacson quotes Eric Raymond, a leading open source software developer and advocate, “Who would have thought that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by tenuous strands of the Internet?”

Albert Blake Dick: 1856 – 1934

An illustration of Albert Blake Dick with a rotary mimeograph machine
An illustration of Albert Blake Dick with a rotary mimeograph machine

When I was in elementary school in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, teachers gave homework and classroom assignments, quizzes and tests on Ditto worksheets. We wrote on them so often that my classmates and I became intimately familiar with the aniline purple color of the Ditto—as well as the mesmerizing smell that emanated from the freshly printed sheets.

Making Dittos was a two-step process. The first step was to prepare the master, a two-ply form that had an easy-to-write-on paper sheet on top and a wax-coated sheet on the bottom. Our teachers would either hand write or typewrite the schoolwork onto one of these typically letter-size Ditto master forms. The pressure of the pen or the typewriter would transfer wax from the bottom sheet onto the back of the top sheet.

The second step—after discarding what was left of the bottom sheet—was to mount the master, bottom side up, onto the Ditto duplicating drum. The wrong-reading wax image contained the “ink” that was progressively broken down by the chemical spread across the drum as it was rotated—often by cranking the cylinder manually—and came into contact with the paper. Several dozen Ditto sheets could be easily produced within minutes.

A Ditto magazine ad from 1954 and a homework sheet from 1970
A Ditto magazine ad from 1954 and a homework sheet from 1970

On occasion, some of us even got to help out by operating the Ditto machine in the main office or teacher prep room. With the potentially messy and smelly solvent involved, sometimes there were mishaps. I bet our teachers ruined their clothes more than once fiddling around with the Ditto chemistry.

* * * * *

The Ditto machine was the American variety of a duplicating system that became popular internationally—the Banda in the UK and the Roneo in France and Australia—in schools, churches, clubs and other small organizations. The Ditto is known generically as a spirit duplicator; the term “spirit” referring to its alcohol-based solvent.

The faintly pleasant odor of the Ditto came from the fact that the each sheet was essentially being coated with “10% of monofluoro tri-chloro methane and 90% of a mixture of 50% methyl alcohol, 40% ethyl alcohol, 5% water and 5% of ethylene glycol mono-ethyl ether.” This composition was developed in the 1930s as a less dangerous alternative to the original spirits of pure methyl/ethyl alcohol with a tendency to combust in confined spaces and air temperatures above 100˚ F.

Since spirit duplicators were limited to a maximum of about 300 copies per master and the quality of reproduction as well as the cost per copy were very low, they became a DIY alternative to more sophisticated printing equipment. The Ditto was perhaps the most successful small office copying system during the four decades prior to the ascension of xerographic toner-based photocopiers in the 1970s.

Spirit duplicators were one of several document reproduction technologies that were developed for the office rather than the printing plant. Office duplicators were first invented in the late 1800s in response to the demands of business for efficiency and economy in reproducing company documents in small numbers. Alongside the typewriter, office duplicators answered the problem of business forms and letters by replacing the tedium of copying each one by hand.

Portrait of Albert Blake Dick
Portrait of Albert Blake Dick

Since commercially available printing machinery was very costly and too slow for these on-demand and short run copying needs, an alternative had to be found. In 1884, a Chicago lumber businessman devised a stencil-based method of document duplication that he would later call the “mimeograph.” From that point forward, the name “A.B. Dick” has been associated with the duplicating era of print technology.

Albert Blake Dick was born on April 16, 1856 in Galesburg, IL, a town about 175 miles southwest of Chicago and 50 miles northwest of Peoria. His parents, Adam Dick and Rebecca Wible, were from western Pennsylvania and decided to settle in Galesburg after helping to establish a church congregation in Quincy, IL.

Albert attended public school in Galesburg and then went to work for a farm equipment manufacturer in the area. After showing success as a manager, he became a partner in a lumber company. Just shy of his 28th birthday on April 11, 1884, the young Albert incorporated a lumber firm, the A.B. Dick Company, located at 740 Jackson Boulevard in Chicago.

It was during these early days that Albert preoccupied himself with the problem of business document reproduction. He rebelled against the effort wasted on a daily basis by hand copying price lists. Albert spent many hours experimenting with many unsuccessful ideas, most of them using the stencil principle.

The stencil method is distinct from other printing methods in which an inked image is mechanically transferred onto a substrate. Once a stencil sheet is prepared, it is mounted upon the ink-filled rotary duplicating drum. When a blank sheet of paper is brought into pressured contact with the rotating drum, ink is forced through the holes in the stencil onto the paper. Silk screening is also a form of stencil printing, but it utilizes a flatbed and squeegee process that is more wasteful than the process associated with A. B. Dick.

“My aim,” Albert would describe on the fiftieth anniversary of his company, “was to find a new means of duplicating letters other than by printing from moveable types, something more economical of both time and money.”

It did not take long. Sometime within the first year of his lumber firm, Albert sat down at his desk and across a piece of waxed paper he forced an awl (long pointed metal spike). After looking more carefully at what he had done, Albert noticed that the awl had left a series of tiny perforations on the wax paper. Developing this method, he perfected a sufficiently coated wax sheet as well as a stylus with which to write that could enable enough ink to be transferred to blank sheets of paper.

While his invention had achieved the immediate goal that he had set for himself, Albert returned his attention back to the development of his lumber company. For the next three years the stencil duplicating technique he pioneered remained an entirely internal matter at the A.B. Dick Company.

In 1887, following multiple inquiries by outsiders as to where a device such as his could be obtained, Albert decided to patent his invention with a plan to market and sell it to the broader business community. In a most peculiar and fortuitous coincidence it turned out that Thomas Alva Edison already held the patent for Albert’s stencil duplicating concept. In 1876, Edison had obtained a patent for his “Edison Electric Pen,” a more primitive implementation of the same principles that Albert had discovered independently, but nonetheless a very popular product.

With the Edison name behind him, Albert Blake Dick set out to sell the stencil printing Mimeograph system across the country
With the Edison name behind him, Albert Blake Dick set out to sell the stencil printing Mimeograph system across the country

Rather than walk away from the opportunity, the young Albert Blake Dick decided to approach Edison with his superior idea and see what arrangements could be made. Edison, ever the entrepreneur, readily accepted that Albert’s solution was simpler and more economical than his motorized pen technology. Furthermore, Edison agreed that his name would be associated with the product that Albert would develop and market.

In preparing to manufacture and sell the stencil system, Albert developed the trademark name. As he explained in 1934, “One day an old friend hit upon the combination of ‘mime’ and ‘graph.’ But it didn’t have the right swing. It wasn’t euphonious. Then the ‘o’ was added, to give it the swing—and the right euphony was acquired.”

The original Model 0 Flatbed Duplicator was sold as the Edison Mimeograph in 1887 and cost $12. A. B. Dick’s inventive genius did not stop there. By 1900, the company had developed the rotary Edison Diaphragm Mimeograph No. 61, the Edison Oscillating Mimeograph No. 71 and the A. B. Dick No.1 Folder, an automatic letter-folding machine.

A 1930 model of the A. B. Dick Mimeograph
A 1930 model of the A. B. Dick Mimeograph machine

By the 1910, there were 200,000 mimeograph machines in use and by 1940, nearly 500,000. In his Office Duplicating—which was printed in 1939 on an A.B. Dick Mimeograph machine—George H. Miller wrote, “There is little doubt that stencil duplicating in America owes its rapid and widespread growth to the Mimeograph machines and stencils as developed by the A.B. Dick Company.”

Albert Blake Dick died on August 15, 1934 and his son Albert Jr. took over the business at that time. In 1949, the company relocated to Niles, IL a suburb of Chicago. By the mid-1970s, while the Xerox machine was rapidly replacing the mimeograph, the A.B. Dick Company had annual sales of $300 million and employed more than 3,000 employees in the Chicago area.

As it declined, the firm was bought and sold by several concerns in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. In 2004, the A.B. Dick Company filed for bankruptcy and Presstek, a manufacturer of digital printing technologies, acquired the assets.

TGO & print media in the digital age

The latest book by Joseph W. Webb, Ph. D. and Richard M. Romano
The latest book by Joseph W. Webb, Ph. D. and Richard M. Romano

In their latest book “This Point Forward: The New Start the Marketplace Demands,” Dr. Joseph W. Webb and Richard Romano offer the following blunt words for printing company representatives: “There is nothing worse than a bald or gray-haired guy standing in front of a bunch of young executives talking about how exciting print is. You’re not a wise elder statesman. You risk being perceived as an old relic who has no clue.”

Webb and Romano are inveighing against print media romanticism, i.e. nostalgic talk about the love of print, how it smells and feels, that it doesn’t require batteries or tech support and that it doesn’t crash or steal your identity, etc. They write “an increasing number of today’s communications and advertising managers do not expect to use print. Why should they? It doesn’t serve their purpose. … Today’s marketing communications managers are highly skilled digital media experts, who are both creative and innovative, and who are fluent in the statistical nature of digital media analytics.”

These are fundamental truths; cultural changes are shaking up the media business and the printing industry is not the only one facing problems. Digital streaming and on-demand have forever disrupted traditional radio and TV broadcast advertising. Any media business that tries to remain some kind of analog island amid the digital ocean is going to be swept under by the next technology or economic tidal wave.

For printing companies, this means morphing away from a print-centric to a digital-centric strategy. Understood as one of many choices that media buyers use to achieve their objectives, print can play a valuable and even critical role. For example, targeted and personalized direct mail­ can be central to a campaign as long it is integrated with a web, email and social media presence where the results are measureable. In short, the future of print depends on its integration into data driven analytics; print needs to be tracked, measured and cost justified or budgets for it will dry up and dollars will be spent on other more effective media forms.

Udi Arieli presenting the Theory of Global Optimization
Udi Arieli presenting the Theory of Global Optimization

While Webb and Romano give an exhaustive review of the strategic reboot that printers require to be successful through 2020, they spend little time on the operational aspects of this transformation. Fortunately, there is someone in the printing industry that has developed a groundbreaking approach to production that makes print a competitive and attractive option for marketers and advertisers for decades to come. That person is Udi Arieli of EFI® and his approach is the Theory of Global Optimization (TGO).

What is the Theory of Global Optimization?

The Theory of Global Optimization is an approach to operational management that responds to all external and internal challenges facing the printing industry today. Its goals are to:

  • improve performance
  • increase throughput
  • accomplish more with diminishing resources
  • increase profitability

It does these things, not with automated and digital equipment although these are critical assets of the printing company of the future, but as a proactive management philosophy. TGO educates the entire organization against the reactive and narrow thinking that predominated in an era when companies could achieve success with limited or no business theory at all.

The two basic concepts of the Theory of Global Optimization are:

  1. Adopt the Global View
    Printing—as well as other custom or “pull” manufacturing businesses—is a chain of independent links. As the complexity of the production process increases and the company grows in size, the need for a global view of the business intensifies. A wider perspective beyond an individual project, client, cost center or machine must guide the decision making on a day-to-day and hour-by-hour basis. The profitability of the business is the result of the sum total of the performance of all jobs, customers, departments and equipment within the company; this is the global view.
  2. Optimize the System
    All areas of the establishment must be synchronized and optimized. The weakest links in the chain—the few constraints within the company that have the most impact on throughput, on-time delivery and costs—must be identified and managed. It is not possible for any individual no matter how talented to comprehend the complex interaction of these variables within the operation. Advanced computerized data collection and scheduling software are required to integrate and automate the critical decision making process.

Evolution of manufacturing theory

For years Udi Arieli has pointed to the relationship of his theory to previous generations of scientific management theory. That the Theory of Global Optimization contains the accomplishments of manufacturing theory going back to the beginning of the industrial revolution—and is also the modern day continuation of those achievements in the digital age—is proven by the following historical review:

  • 1801: Eli Whitney / Interchangeable Parts
    Eli Whitney
    Eli Whitney

    Whitney is known for two related contributions to industrialization: the mechanized of farming (invention of the cotton gin in 1793) and, although he did not originate it, the promulgation of interchangeable parts. Whitney’s name is associated with the concept of interchangeable parts—the production of identical components made to specifications such that one part can freely and easily replace another—because he demonstrated the principle by assembling ten guns from a pile of mixed parts in front of Congress in July 1801. In the later 1800s this method became known as the “American system of manufacturing” as it increasingly utilized machine tools and semi-skilled labor to produce the parts to specified tolerances instead of the manual labor of skilled craftsmen.

  • 1911: Frederick Taylor / Scientific Management
    Frederick W. Taylor
    Frederick W. Taylor

    At the turn of the twentieth century, Frederick Taylor extended the ideas and methods of the American system of manufacturing by studying labor productivity and introducing advanced planning into the production process. What is now known as “Taylorism” introduced ideas of scientific management and process management onto the production floor. Concepts such as “workflow” and “automation” emerged later from Taylor’s breakthrough stopwatch time and motion studies and his analysis of the functions and stages of the manufacturing process.

  • 1913: Henry Ford / Assembly Line
    Henry Ford in 1914
    Henry Ford in 1914

    Both interchangeable parts and scientific management methods were employed by Henry Ford in the startup of assembly line production of the Model T on December 1, 1913 in the Highland Park, Michigan. Also known as progressive assembly, the breakthrough of the assembly line was described by one of Ford’s top executives and engineers, Charles E. Sorenson, as “the practice of moving the work from one worker to another until it became a complete unit, then arranging the flow of these units at the right time and the right place to a moving final assembly line from which came a finished product.” Although this method had been pioneered by Ransom Olds in 1901, Henry Ford is credited with perfecting and sponsoring it by agreeing to the installation of a motorized conveyor belt that enabled a Model T to be assembled in 93 minutes.

  • 1950: W. Edwards Deming / Process Control
    W. Edwards Deming in 1953
    W. Edwards Deming in 1953

    Following World War II, W. Edwards Deming further advanced scientific management theory by demonstrating that organizational cooperation and learning can improve manufactured product quality and reduce costs; that effective process control requires data gathering and measurement; that every process has a range and causes of variation in quality; that production workers should participate in continuous improvement initiatives. Deming gained worldwide notoriety for his pioneering work with the leaders of Japanese industry during what became known as the “Japanese post-war economic miracle” of 1950-1960. At first, Deming’s ideas were eschewed in the US for a host of cultural reasons. But by the 1980s, he was working directly with Ford Motor Company on a top to bottom quality manufacturing initiative and he would go on the become one of the most sought after experts on business management.

  • 1984: Eliyahu Goldratt / Theory of Constraints (TOC)
    Eliyahu Goldratt
    Eliyahu Goldratt

    In 1984, Eliyahu Goldratt wrote a novel called “The Goal,” which tells the story of Alex Rogo the manager of a production plant owned by UniCo Manufacturing. Rogo’s dilemma is that the plant is always running behind schedule and his job is on the line with upper management if he proves incapable of fixing the problems. The book was a clever method for Goldratt to explain his Theory of Constraints. TOC involves the successful management of constraints in the manufacturing process, i.e. focusing on those links in the chain—equipment, people and/or policies—that are preventing the organization from achieving its goal. Much of Goldratt’s TOC approach is derived from Deming’s notion that organizational cooperation and learning are keys to achieving agreed upon objectives; that measurement of indicators is required to gauge the impact of continuous improvement decisions.

  • 1984: Udi Arieli / Theory of Global Optimization (TGO)

    Udi Arieli
    Udi Arieli

    In the 1970s, as the third generation owner/operator of his family printing company in Israel, Udi Arieli realized that printing companies needed two things: a more advance business theory and smart software tools to manage the complex challenges they faced. In 1984, Arieli founded a company dedicated to developing intelligent production management solutions for the printing industry. While working on software, he established the elements of the Theory of Global Optimization. Arieli saw that the modern printing establishment (like many manufacturing businesses) had multiple interdependent processes—some were serial and some were parallel—that made manual- or analog-based decision making nearly impossible. Extending Goldratt’s theories, Arieli recognized that managing constraints in this dynamic environment required that production processes be replicated in a computerized scheduling model such that they could be globally synchronized and optimized. TGO is also derived from Deming’s teachings in that it educates and changes the thought process and culture of the entire business organization.

The future of print production management systems

Today TGO is more than a theory; it has become the foundation science on which EFI builds its management solutions. PrintFlow Dynamic Scheduling, for example, was the first software developed by Udi Arieli and his team based on the Theory of Global Optimization. PrintFlow acts as an operational umbrella for the business, gathering information about jobs, delivery commitments, production plans, resource availability and raw materials—generating run lists based on the best plan, not for an individual job, but for the business as a whole.

PrintFlow uses sequencing and optimization algorithms to maximize throughput while, at the same time, offering “what-if” and “weak-link” analytics to address real-world situations in real-time. PrintFlow is smart software that works with literally thousands of pieces of information to deliver a globally optimized plan that evolves with every new job and every new situation a printing business encounters.

TGO has evolved to become the foundation of EFI’s Automated Intelligent Workflow, bringing the printing industry to new levels of efficiency and savings. Recognizing the value of the Theory of Global Optimization, EFI continues to invest significant resources into its product suite—Digital StoreFront®, its MIS/ERP solutions, PrintFlow, Fiery®, VUTEk® and Jetrion®—so that they operate according to TGO principles.

It is not accidental that Udi Arieli developed the Theory of Global Optimization as a solution to the problems of the printing industry, one of the most complex and largest custom manufacturing sectors of the economy. The great value of Theory of Global Optimization is that it provides a framework for printing company executives to make their way out of the analog world of landline phone call status updates and into the digital world of client dashboard apps, automated text communications and email tracking information. By utilizing TGO, the printing firm of today can begin the practical transition of becoming the integrated media supplier of tomorrow.

By employing sophisticated digital operations management tools, print media suppliers can interact with the young advertising and marketing clients—that Webb and Romano write about—in a manner that fits their lifestyle and habits, i.e. more like their digital media suppliers. If print is going to survive in the digital age, it has to become easier to order, easier to produce, easier to track and easier to cost justify. Now that is the new start that the marketplace demands.