***Company Profile - Fractal Design - Eric Hautemont, President
by John Latta
WAVE visited with Eric Hautemont to gain Fractal's view on the
professional tools market.
Fractal Design is focusing on suites, but in marked contrast to that
taken in office suites and by Macromedia. Eric stated that a high degree
of product integration is essential and graphics programs provide for a
level of data integration not seen in other products. An implementation
of this richness comes with their interchange file format which has not
only RGB and Alpha but also includes an extensive geometry description.
For example, it is possible to apply a visual depth-of-field filter to an
image across various suite applications.
Fractal sees four parts to the suite: Drawing (Expression), Painting
(Painter 4), 3D (Ray Dream Studio) and Image Manipulation (Adobe
Photoshop). Eric believes just plugging any program in the suite bin is
unacceptable and that each program must stand on its own merits in the
professional community. Painter is an excellent example of a product
which meets this criteria. Painter has come to dominate its own niche as
the paint package of choice by professionals because of its focus on
natural media. The company believes that Expression will reach that same
position in the drawing tool market. In response to the observation that
the drawing market is already dominated by Adobe Illustration and
Macromedia Freehand, Eric states that these programs have gone away from
the needs of professionals and are more production oriented. A retort is
that "spell checkers have nothing to do with drawing."
It may seem as if Photoshop is misplaced here but Eric responds that
Fractal has implemented the deepest file format integration for Photoshop
of any professional program. They support layers, floaters, shapes, paths
object channels and object tagging. Rather than build a suite with one
component which is weak, as a competitor to Photoshop, Fractal has
elected to provide for a rich integration with Photoshop to take maximum
advantage of its strengths as part of the Fractal suite.
A key to the suite philosophy is that Fractal's professional programs
must have creative expressiveness and that if we do the integration well
customers will want to buy suites from us. Eric sees the suite concept
going well beyond just the four components. Built on the rich file
formats the 4 part suite can be enlarged and the first example is
Detailer which lets one paint on 3D surfaces. It was hinted that Detailer
is one of many products to come which integrate into Fractal's suite
approach.
Fractal's view of the 3D product space is that there are three criteria
for market success: market share, market share and market share. The time
to gather market share is now. Although it may seem odd for a product
which is street priced at $299 and with sidegrade offer of $199, that
Fractal sees as it closest competitor 3D Studio and the company is even
less concerned about the impact of 3D Studio MAX.
The 3D software market is a unique one compared to the other professional
packages in the suite. Having a low cost version of the 3D software,
i.e., Ray Dream Designer for $99, makes sense while a low cost painting
or drawing program does not fit their market space. A key reason being
the what Fractal calls the Sunday user or Hobbyist in 3D who will readily
buy the low cost version. This is the fastest growing segment of the
market and in a prior interview Eric indicated this was as large as 40%
of their 3D sales.
Where does Eric see as the future of the market?
First, he sees a new from of media which is the aggregation of (in Apple
terms) QuickTime VR; Real Time 3D and VRML 2.0; and 2D Texture Mapped
Polygons. This will all happen in the next year. DVD plays a very
important role in this market in that it is the only medium which can
store all the data to create rich content. At the same time Eric asks the
question - is a real time media engine (an accelerator for this content)
necessary? Eric is not so sure.
His second observation is about the direction of technology. Eric noted
from SIGGRAPH, especially in the last two years, a shift from 3D to
exciting developments in 2D. Because 3D has become so competitive he
feels that innovation, at least that which can be discerned from the
publications, has come to a halt. An example, which fits the increasing
role of 2D in a 3D space is Talisman. With this Microsoft has shown its
ability to take a different approach and against conventional 3D wisdom.
Lastly, Eric expects that the Net will move to worlds (3D environments)
and there will be major opportunities for those who create worlds. At the
same time bandwidth will continue to be a major limitation. This means
that worlds will not get downloaded but come from content on Hybrid DVD.
With such local storage of the world the only requirements for
communications are characters.
Some interesting statistics:
In the last quarter, Fractal showed a 20% growth in the Mac market (while
most were down) and a 80% growth in the Windows market.
The installed base of purchased (not bundled) Ray Dream Studio and Ray
Dream Designer is 100,000+.
It is estimated that there are 0.5m creative professionals and 5m
hobbyists.
Fractal: http://www.fractal.com
Wave Issue 9611 10/25/96 Article 8-01