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> > >http://www.ptc.com/ > >About the deal >Needham, MA - July 6, 2005 - Today PTC announced it has entered into a >definitive agreement to acquire Arbortext, Inc., a recognized leader in the >emerging Dynamic Enterprise Publishing market, for $190 million in cash. >Arbortext serves 1,700 customers worldwide in multiple industries, including >discrete manufacturing, life sciences, financial services, insurance, >publishing and government. With this acquisition, PTC will be uniquely >positioned to enable customers to create, manage and dynamically publish >critical information concurrently with the development of related products >or services, improving time-to-market, quality, cost and customer >satisfaction. > >  > There's a moral here somewhere. PTC is a jumped up CAD company, now doing "product lifecycle management". That's product as in 'thing'. Hardware even. They've got two CAD products, a CMS (Windchill) and several other 'lifecycle' things. They're springing  $190 meg to add techdocs to their glued-together "suite". By itself it doesn't sound like a big deal. But it says a lot about the SGML/xml-doc world. A niche market company nobody ever heard of is buying Arbortext to fill a gap in a kludged up product line that might let them play Corel to AutoCAD's Microsoft. What makes it sting even more is that XMetal was picked up by a web advertising company because it was cheaper to buy XMetal than migrate to OpenOffice. We are not where it's at folks. Frank
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