In the early days of desktop publishing (yes, I'm that old) nothing was for certain. Technology was brand new, bleeding edge and exciting. Each new issue of a magazine produced with the new (and yet unproven) tools was a victory over chaos, a bold step into a better and easier world of computer-based publishing.

And then, little by little, things started to work. File formats were perfected, output methods became reliable, more and more publishers converted to the new tools. The battle of DTP was over, and there were more important issues to attend to, new frontiers to explore. The Internet, digital imaging, streaming video … DTP was suddenly so last decade.

The reality is that we have lived with the same design and publishing workflows since the early '90s. A very sizable chunk of publications are even produced with software that saw the light of the CRT back then.

Walk into any publishing house today, and you will probably find an unbelievable hodgepodge of production methods: QuarkXPress 3.2 (yes, it's still out there), QuarkXPress 4.x running on 10-year-old Macs, QuarkXPress 4.x running on a brand new G5 in Classic mode, InDesign, FrameMaker, PageMaker, you name it.

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The surprising thing is that after dire predictions for its more or less imminent demise late in the last century, print has come back big time. Not only print, that is. The whole creative workflow is suddenly HOT again.

What has happened? Simple: Whenever you get technology that enables an inspired individual or small group to do things differently, you have the potential for change.

It is not one single element that does the trick, but a conjunction of events. DTP happened because of two or three interdependent events: the arrival of the Macintosh and its graphical user interface; the first page layout software; and the arrival of PostScript laser printers, all in more or less one year. Individually, none of these events could have done the trick; together they were dynamite.

Today, the ingredients for change are more varied, but we are again in a cumulative situation of change. Digital imaging, and particularly digital SLRs and the Camera Raw files, redefine the way we use photography. High-speed networking and high-capacity storage have a decisive impact on our way of handling data. Design software has reached a new level of functionality. And once again, Mac OS plays a pivotal role in pushing the envelope in terms of operating system functionality.

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While individually, the changes themselves may sound borderline boring (how exciting is workflow for the average user really?), there is a sense of foreboding in the industry. There is new potential in the tools, new ways of being efficient by combining existing possibilities in a new way.

In the end, it boils down to enabling the user, rather than telling him what to do. The striking thing about the latest edition of Adobe's Creative Suite is not what it does, but which doors it opens. Adobe Bridge, which is very much the centerpiece of Creative Suite 2, is not a pre-established workflow; it offers a variety of ways to make file manipulations more efficient. It is not a solution; it is an invitation to experiment.

Given the success of the first release of its Creative Suite, Adobe is likely to have a significant impact on the market—not only on users, but also in terms of developments. Already Quark is readying the next release of QuarkXPress, Version 7, to be released later this year. (It's good to see what a bit of healthy competition does …)

As in the early days of DTP, it is up to technology providers to make the market exciting, and it's up to the inspired user to drive change. And once we get started, there are lots of things to be re-invented.

Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.