Visualize This: Profits and Fun Too
In many ways, Kai Krause is a throwback to the early days of the personal computer revolution, when the joy of creating digital magic tricks was a little less adulterated by the demands of big business.
Tall and thin, with long blond hair, a walrus mustache and a slight accent that betrays his German roots, he revels in being “my own best geek,” developing software that satisfies his own sensibility, and assuming that others will like it too.
“It’s the ‘Yo, Fred, check this out’ factor,” says Krause.
But Krause and his compatriots at MetaCreations Corp. in Carpinteria are definitely ambitious businessmen too, and their company is starting to get big.
After carving out a niche supplying add-on modules for professional graphics software, the company, then known as MetaTools, launched its first consumer product last year, and earlier this year merged with Fractal Design Corp.--developer of a popular graphics program called Painter--to form MetaCreations, a company that’s now approaching $80 million a year in revenue.
At that level of sales, MetaCreations is beginning to play with the big boys. Its latest product--Kai’s Photo Soap, a program for “cleaning up” and enhancing pictures on a computer--puts it in direct competition with Microsoft, Adobe Systems, Broderbund Software and other established players in a hot corner of the unforgiving consumer software business.
And Krause, though he won’t quite come out and say it, aspires not merely to set the pace in what’s now known as “visual computing,” but to redefine personal computing as we know it.
That’s not to say that MetaCreations is about to take on Microsoft in the operating systems business. “If we get too much in the face of other people,” Krause hints ominously, all could be lost. And surely John Wilczak, a onetime General Electric executive who, as MetaCreations’ founder and chief executive, plays the sober businessman to Krause’s ebullient technophile, would never stand for such a suicidal strategy.
Take a look at Photo Soap, though, and you can see the makings of stealth revolution against Windows. Most strikingly, there are no menu bars. The program initially presents you with a series of “rooms”--In, Prep, Tone, Color, Detail, Finishing and Out--which one can enter to perform particular tasks.
A novice can begin in the In room and pretty much figure out what to do--something that’s almost impossible with a program like Adobe Photoshop. The controls, be they brushes for painting or magnifying glasses for zooming in and out or sliding controls for changing color tones, are all custom-designed and bear no resemblance to traditional Windows icons.
For a $49 software program, the depth and breadth of image-editing capabilities are almost shocking. That’s partly a testament to MetaCreations’ technical prowess--and partly a reflection of the incredible increases in computer processing power and storage capabilities that Krause believes are making the old metaphors obsolete.
MetaCreations’ strategy is based on the idea that advanced computer-imaging technology is poised to make the leap from professional publishing and special effects to the mainstream business and consumer PC. Digital photography is now emerging as an important means of capturing, storing and reproducing images, and that will create a broad new market for image-handling tools.
Over time, visual-computing capabilities are likely to be used in ways we can only begin to imagine. Many kinds of business data, for example, might be usefully analyzed in new kinds of graphical forms--and Wilczak indicates that MetaCreations has some upcoming products along those lines. Digital video and animation, for both consumers and professionals, are big growth areas too.
“We’re at the dawn of a new era in what you can do with your PC, and everything is falling into place for us,” says Wilczak.
The challenge for MetaCreations is to succeed in the mainstream software business while retaining its broader vision of what visual computing might be--and to do both those things while growing rapidly. MetaCreations has 140 people in this seaside city near Santa Barbara--two new buildings are under construction--and another 120 in Scotts Valley in Northern California.
It also has a small research arm in Princeton, N.J., the result of the acquisition of a company called Real Time Geometry, which was founded by a renowned Russian physicist and has developed a breakthrough method for creating and representing three-dimensional images.
Executives say the merger has gone smoothly despite the geographic dispersal. The company’s “code base”--its underlying software technology--appears formidable. Krause is clearly an inspired designer; Fractal Design founder Marc Zimmer (now chief technology officer) is a top-level technical talent; and, with Wilczak and new recruits such as former Apple advanced systems director Frank Casanova, the management team looks strong.
Still, PC software these days is a hit-driven business. A couple of dud products, or even a late one, can send a mid-size software company reeling.
While Soap and Kai’s Power Goo, a program for distorting faces and other images in all kinds of fun ways, have sold well, it may be some time before visual-computing tools have a substantial presence outside of the professionals’ niche. And establishing a new kind of computing interface is extremely difficult, since customers will be reluctant to learn a new way of doing things.
MetaCreations’ financials, in fact, are nothing to write home about. The company has veered in and out of profitability, and its last quarter was a disappointment as a result of two products’ shipping late. The stock has performed poorly: It’s now trading in the $11 range, far below the $18 at which MetaTools went public in December 1995.
Still, Krause is serene. Though impatient with the need to make the quarterly numbers, he’s enough of a realist to see that his grander goals can only be realized if the company does well. And he’s convinced that bringing out the fun in computing will ultimately go hand in hand with making a profit.
“I want to bring back the adrenaline level of what it was like in the early days,” he says. “There was something in the air, and I miss that feeling. If we can bring back that element, the fun, the playfulness . . . you can get them [the users] through that early tunnel.”
In other words, if a software tool is inexpensive and elegant and entertaining, people will learn how to use it, and then they’ll have a stake in the new type of computing environment that MetaCreations wants to build. For the next era of computing, after all, these are the good old days.
