Adobe's announcement of Project Rome is an interesting (yet inevitable) move for the creative industry giant. Aimed at SMEs, it claims to allow anyone to author interactive digital content.
Whilst the anyone claim might be a little far fetched, it definitely looks like a concerted move to start to put end users of a number of their products out of business. I've been saying for a while that small scale web design houses have a limited shelf life, and this (to mangle metaphors) sounds another nail in their HTML coffins.
It's not the only area where the technical barriers to creative entry are being stripped away. In the music world, software like the incredible Reason mean that for a few hundred quid and a relatively under-powered PC you can have access to the equivalent of a set of studio equipment and an engineer that would have costs hundreds of thousands of pounds but a decade ago.
In Adobe's main, Creative Suite, offering, tools like Content Aware Fill offer timesaving the like of which haven't been seen before, and if I were a photo retoucher by trade, I'd be looking to cross-train at the moment.
Digital cameras and (often free) editing software are another example: when the cost of each shot is essentially zero, anyone can take a great photo if you take enough… Monkeys, typewriters and the work of the great bard spring to mind (but without the burden of infinity).
Now these tools don't give people creativity. But they remove the technical knowledge or the time required so that someone without the technical training can possibly be on a level playing field. There are a few challenges that this stuff poses for the creative industries.
Firstly the obvious – that in a world without barriers to entry, you all of a sudden multiply competition. Secondly, that in a world dominated by freelancers paid by the hour, timesaving tools aren't in the creative's interest. But finally that sometimes, maybe, mindnumbing tasks or setting up or other stuff that is seemingly wasted time might be more valuable than we at first think: it can offer the opportunity to plan, to reflect, to think about how we might do things better.
mmitII 