As in many industries, the world of software for web publishing is dominated by one major player and a scattering of smaller players scrambling for their own piece of the market. One company that has found a way to rise above it all is Softpress Systems Ltd. of England with their flagship web design product, Freeway Pro.
The story of Softpress is an intriguing one, starting with their founding in 1993 “to address to emerging needs of professional publishers and designers for cross-media authoring tools”. They started as a page-layout software company aimed at publishing to print.
A year after Softpress’ founding, a company at that time known as Mosaic Communications released the world’s first commercial internet browser, Mosaic Netscape 0.9. Mosaic, later to be called Netscape, changed the world of publishing immediately.
As the world of the internet grew exponentially, so too did the need for new tools to design pages for this entirely new medium. Softpress then took a strategic leap, redesigning its software product line to create Freeway, a unique platform that combined the ease of page layout with a powerful platform to publish those pages to the web.
Along the way, they also proved skilled at managing strategic partnerships and customer relationships within their unique Mac-only ecosystem. Their story is a powerful one that illustrates how understanding the strategic positioning needs of a niche player in their business ecosystem can lead to strong continued success, in spite of the presence of much larger mainstream players around them.
To hear more about this company’s carefully crafted path to success, we talked with Mr. Ian Schray, U.S. Marketing Manager of Softpress Systems Ltd. You can listen in to his interview by clicking on the link below.
Finally, in the interests of full disclosure, we also want to acknowledge that Stranova’s website itself was designed and published using Freeway Pro, but the software choice and the website were developed long before this interview was ever conceived.
We are proud to be able to showcase this company in yet another of our interview series with Strategic Innovators.
Update 6/13/08: We just heard today from Ian Schray that Softpress’s Freeway 5 was just honored with the Macworld UK award for “Creative Web Product of the Year”. We are happy to send our congratulations as well, in recognition of the well-deserved innovative work this company continues to produce.
freeway page layout software software strategy