The company's Deck software would allow Macromedia to "offer a complete solution for musicians, sound technicians, and video professionals who make up the growing audio side of the multimedia industry," the release said.
Rosen, Dalton, and Myrberg received 225,000 shares of Macromedia stock in exchange for all rights to OSC, according to Macromedia documents. The deal was described in Macromedia investor materials as being worth $2.8 million.
But by the spring of 1996, at the trough of Macromedia's stock plunge, the shares involved were worth less than $600,000 -- about what you'd pay in San Francisco for a low-rent-neighborhood delicatessen.
The collapse of Macromedia stock prices didn't merely diminish the value of the holdings of its three newest shareholders, Rosen, Dalton, and Myrberg. That free fall led to a dramatic reconsideration by Macromedia's board of directors of how the company would do business.
By 1996, the computer "multimedia" market wasn't centered around production of infotainment compact discs, as in-dustry planners had believed it would be five years previously, but on the World Wide Web. The Web required small, quick programs that could be easily transported over telephone lines. Macromedia's products largely con-sisted of disc-gobbling programs designed for people using computers to produce magazines, records, movies -- old media. If it was to survive, the company's fate had to be tied to the growth of the Internet, company directors decided. The old multimedia wheel would have to be reinvented.
From OSC's perspective, this was a truly unfortunate chain of events. Though there was some talk of turning Deck into a Web product, the truth was that it was a large, sophisticated program designed for the sort of super-high-fidelity audio production that isn't yet part of the Web universe. What's more, OSC's band of entrepreneurial punk-techno rockers wasn't exactly a good fit with Macromedia's new, all-out-panic corporate culture.
"They didn't really know what to do with us," Tommy King recalls.
There were efforts to integrate. Souvignier was given a "contract" to do some technical writing. King was given a desk and told to call all the Macro-media sales representatives and inform them they were carrying Deck, and call the OSC representatives to explain that they weren't.
Mats Myrberg, the Swedish genius, was put to work on "temporary" Web-oriented projects, and never seemed to have enough time to work on the planned "Deck 3.0" upgrade. Josh Rosen struggled to maintain the groovy OSC workplace -- the time off for music composition, the ideological fervor, all the other old-OSC accouterments -- and failed. John Dalton went his own way. So did Jeff Moore.
The countercorporate Shangri-La that the OSC boys felt they were creating at the company's old SOMA offices crumbled before their eyes at Macromedia.
From in-house sound studios, leather jackets at trade shows, midafternoon pot breaks, and officewide jam sessions, the boys now found themselves amid cubicles, suits, corporate titles, and petty office jealousies. Worse, Macromedia didn't seem to be doing near enough to market their product.
After less than a year, Macromedia decided to abandon development of Deck 3.0. In engineer-per-dollar-of-income terms, Deck wasn't as profitable as other Macromedia products, and keeping it alive didn't seem to make sense, Macromedia executives say. The company reassigned as many OSC engineers as would stay, and it let go personnel who did not easily fit into the company's new, Web-centric strategy.
Suddenly, the OSC saga was over.
As is often the case in Silicon Valley's hyperactive economy, OSC alumni didn't have a hard time finding jobs. Dalton and Rosen are partners in a SOMA movie sound studio, and Dalton is working on his own software, which, if successful, would allow Internet search engines to seek for images, rather than word cues. Myrberg is also working as a software engineer.
The OSC boys lost their battle to create a successful Silicon Valley start-up. But some of them find consolation in the idea that they won the war to bring studio-quality recording to the masses.
Todd Souvignier says this came to him in an epiphany, as he strolled down the aisles of a computer show last fall. Deck-style hard-disk recording has become so ubiquitous, and new entrants into the field have become so many, that Souvignier ran across a booth giving away a product very much like Deck for free, as part of a larger sound production package. The package is called Pro Tools III With Power Mix. It is made by Digidesign, the company that had tried to keep OSC's efforts out of the hands of all but the most well-heeled customers.
"I'm saying we won. We got to a place in 1996 where hard-disk recording can be given away for free. We had to throw ourselves on our swords to win, but we won," says Souvignier.
Even so, the former OSC boys will never work on improving Deck, or feel like they own it, again. They won't take as many marijuana breaks, jam-session breaks, or whiskey breaks at work. And they probably won't ever again be cutting-edge, anti-establishment digital revolutionaries, because they've already been eaten by regular old capitalism, the way start-ups ordinary and extraordinary so often are.
Silicon Valley magazines may chant that digital man is a new breed living by new economic rules. He's not. The OSC story -- its founders' brash conceits and seat-of-the-pants survival skills, the miscalculations that led to its sale, the pandemonium that led to its demise -- is the tale of entrepreneurial failure that has always been a part of American business, even and especially when business is booming. Here as everywhere in the world of capitalism, brilliant start-ups fail by the barrelful, gaggles of geniuses are made dunces every day, dreams get shattered, idealism is torn asunder, and a good time is had by all.
For a very short cool, hip, memorable while.
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