Mirye Software Publishing Launches
Proactive International has just launched Mirye (pronounced “mee-ri”), a software publishing unit. Mirye will initially serve two markets where Proactive has business offices- North America and Japan. Proactive International has just launched Mirye (pronounced “mee-ri”), a software publishing unit.
Mirye as a publishing unit fills a need for bringing together cross-platform, high performance tools in demand by the digital production market. Well, that sounds like Adobe, doesn’t it? The reason behind Mirye isn’t to specifically compete with the largest industry players like Adobe or Microsoft but to position high quality, creative products for professionals so that they can be successful in the software marketplace - by making them more accessible and more usable by a wider audience.
That’s the point of direct internet sales, isn’t it? It is the opposite - the mid 90’s saw a steady move towards direct, download sales. While selling the products of Now Software and Qualcomm’s Eudora email product line (then the dominant email client with millions of users) in the mid 90’s, direct internet sales were simply a little something extra compared to the massive pipe known as the software channel. Since the ’90s though, an entire generation of internet era CEOs have grown up and built their business around purely internet solutions like Google AdWords marketing. The seeming measure of success is entirely direct and through download for most software titles - and many new developers have no experience at all with the traditional channel. This was a great cause of lament for many smaller publishers, republishers and distributors in every market that either didn’t see this coming or were in denial. Many publishers in Asia and Europe crashed and burned through no fault of the dot com implosion.
The new challenge in publishing and distribution is not the newness of the current software market; the software market has not entirely transformed itself into a purely new economy but exists in a hybrid state. With this hybrid state - you see revenue generation in the reverse of the 90’s - the largest revenue is potentially purely electronic, whereas other venues have increased in relative importance (to the dollar amount generated) because they enable reaching key primary influencers in specific market segments where it is considered safe and smart to buy only Microsoft or Adobe products - through specific authorized value added resellers, integrators or service providers.
