The software bubble is what is happening when major software suppliers that are dependent upon continually introducing upgraded versions of software for ongoing revenue, find customers are not taking up offers to update their systems. The major software suppliers are continually adding new features to their software packages and endeavouring to get their customers to keep buying the latest versions of the software. It is not just Adobe that is seeing users not upgrading their software. Most software suppliers are in a similar situation. Microsoft has found that many Windows users are happy to stick with existing XP or earlier versions of Windows rather than moving to Vista, and in future one may ask will users move to Windows 7. Because of falling sales Microsoft, like Adobe, has made a substantial number of staff redundant. In addition many users are not keen to upgrade to latest software releases as many of these releases require computers to be upgraded before they can operate. For example in my case my two-year old Dell laptop cannot run Vista even if I upgrade it to its maximum memory.  It also has no chance of running Adobe Creative Suite 4. We are also seeing many Microsoft Office users not upgrading to the latest Office 2007/2008 software, and still using earlier Office applications. In fact I find when I send out articles I have written using the latest version of Microsoft Word that generates a .docx file, that many of my publishers around the world cannot read this type of file. I then have to revert to the standard .doc format that started with Office 97.

With the credit crunch I think we may see a major rethinking of how we buy and use software. The cost of both buying and upgrading software may well be seen as an unnecessary cost. Today there are alternatives to buying software from major software companies. This includes office applications like Microsoft Office and print and publishing applications like Adobe Creative Suite and Quark Xpress, where alternatives are available through Open Source Software (OSS) offerings. In the office area Open Office provides an alternative to the functionality of Microsoft Office, with applications for writing and desktop publishing, mathematical formulae, presentations, graphics and diagrams, spreadsheets and database with queries and reports. For publishers in the areas of page layout there are alternatives to Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress with products like Xclamation, Passeportout and Scribus. (There is an excellent article in the Seybold Report, Volume 9, No. 1 of January 8, 2009 on Scribus by Eliot Harper). We also see Open Source products like the Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail system. Most Open Source Software is widely cross platform and available in multiple languages.

This brings the questions about what may happen when budgets get cut and publishers think about how to make savings. The first thing they do is to stop updating their systems. For those of us who have been in computing since the days when IBM was the only solution, Intel hadn’t started, and Bill Gates was still in infant school, the ethos was “if it ain’t broke, don’t mend it.” If your system works why change to get new facilities you haven’t asked for, and which may cause you a period of grief while you try to get the new system to work. The second thing is if you are thinking of a new system should you think of paying for a software licence for 200 seats for a leading system supplier, or do you pay nothing and use Open Source Software like Scribus and Open Office.