Adobe & MM Fonts: Insight From the Inside

For years, many typography professionals have wondered what happened to Adobe’s Multiple Master technology. Others don’t really miss it at all, either because it was too difficult to understand or because they never encountered an MM font (very few were released). Last night, on Typophile, Hrant Papazian put the question to Thomas Phinney of Adobe: “Why did MM fail?”

Reason 1: Lack of support within Adobe

Where MM failed was in the Adobe type group not realizing that they needed to put huge amounts of energy into evangelizing the applications and UI people. So it was a failure of internal marketing.

Reason 2: End Users Didn’t Get On Board

Actually, the MM fonts sold well, but our research showed that most users only used the default instances and never made custom instances. For them, we would have made their lives easier if we sold them separate fonts with nice clear names. ... It was difficult to explain the value proposition to customers. “Yes, I know there are only two font files, but they recombobulate into a couple of dozen fonts, so that’s what you should pay for!” That was not a line that went over very easily, and was not seriously pursued for long. So they were not sold by Adobe at prices that came anywhere near reflecting the work that went into them.

OpenType’s success:

Adobe’s type group learned a lot from the MM experience. We knew that with OpenType we would have to work our rear ends off to explain the benefits to our own application people, and market it heavily internally. We did exactly that, with the result that we had more support for specific features of OpenType when the first fonts shipped, than we got for MM fonts in ten years. ... Finally, it’s true that the advanced features of OpenType for western languages are pretty much an Adobe-only game right now. But this will change within a couple of years. Juergen Kurz (Tim Gill's replacement at Quark) told me at Seybold that QuarkXPress 7 will support both Unicode and OpenType layout goodness.

OpenType is seeing success in another key realm as well; the number of new OpenType font releases from foundries other than Adobe is steadily growing. Typographica listed a few of those in August and we’ll update that list soon.