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PC Week gave Studio Software some coverage and starting in mid-1986 started working with them much more closely, with Studio Software providing expert comments on quite a few desktop publishing articles in general. It's not clear to me if PC Week reached out to SSC, or if SSC was paying for coverage in the leadup to and months after the launch of FrontPage. The latter would make more sense, but I have no evidence either way. PC Week seemingly cannot get DO-IT's branding consistent at all, using both "Do-It" and "DO-IT", versions with spaces instead of hyphens, versions with neither hyphens nor spaces, and finally ending the chart summarizing their financials in their corporate obituary with "Do IT".

My original plan was to just quote every single time they showed up, but that was so often that I think that started to strain the definition of fair use. So instead I'm going to quote just a few highlights for the sake of the company's history and the rest are just references you can look up yourself if you can find your own copies. I highly recommend trying to get your own anyway anyway as PC Week is just a fantastic look at the era.

I've grouped the references by subject and then by date within each group. I've only been able to get my hands on physical copies for a few of the relevant issues, so the rest are just text or description only. I am also still trying to track down 1985 and earlier at all, so our story for this page starts in January of 1986.

Major Articles

FrontPage Announcement

FrontPage was formally announced in the 1986-07-08 issue (page 28):

PC Publishing Package Gains Graphics Features
IRVINE, CA—Studio Software will release a PC desktop-publishing package, called FrontPage, to retail stores at the of this month. FrontPage is an upgrade of the firm’s first entry into the desktop-publishing field, Do-It, which was introduced a year ago.
“It’s an evolutionary product from DoIt, adding new graphic functionality and screen editing,” said Peter Clarno, vice president for product planning and development.
FrontPage adds the ability to read in graphic files such as Lotus pic files, AutoCad and Freelance. It also offers full hyphenation and justification, the ability to freely mix typestyles and sizes and onscreen editing of up to 250 characters.
FrontPage also includes a dozen pre-formatted pages into which text and graphics can be poured like Jell-O into a mold, said Clarno.
The program is considered to be a short document solution, useful in preparing reports, brochures, proposals, newsletters and sales literature, said Charles Morrissey, the firm’s president. It allows users to handle up to eight pages interactively.
FrontPage also includes a dozen pre-formatted pages into which text and graphics He expects the sales of laser printers to spur sales of his own product. “As sales of laser printers continue to grow, business users are looking for ways to take full advantage of the remarkable cabilities this technology has to offer. Unfortunately, to date, software which exploits those capabilities has been sadly lacking on the PC. FrontPage is designed to fill that gap.”
With FrontPage, Studio is promoting its ability to offer near blanket compatibility with software, scanners, CD-ROM, output and network communications. “It’s an a la carte” strategy, said Clarno. It lets users shop around for the software and peripherals they want.
FrontPage comes with drivers for three laser printers: the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet, the AST Turbo Laser and the QMS, Apple LaserWriter and other devices using the PostScript page-description language.
Driver kits for other printers and scanners will be sold for $195 each.
Other Drivers Planned
Studio plans to offer drivers for other peripherals, including IBM’s just announced scanners and Direct Graphic Interface Specification (DGIS) cards, when those products hit the market.
“FrontPage is the glue that brings all the applications, word processing, spreadsheets and graphics together,” said Clarno. Page layout and freehand drawing are done through FrontPage’s icon-orientated interface using a mouse.
“Visual displays are the easiest way to do desktop publishing. Page layout is a visually orientated thing.” Frontpage requires an IBM PC XT or AT and 512K bytes of memory, although 640K bytes is recommended.
Although Studio Software has yet to announce which retail stores will sell the software, it will sell for $695 in a network of 1,000 retailers in the United States, Europe and Australia. A more advanced version, called FrontPage Plus, will be sold for $1,295 to value-added resellers only. It is being marketed toward professionals who need a separate utility with additional drivers and interfaces to link their equipment to a wide range of photocomposition systems.

While this says "end of the month" for release date, the writeup for the company's closure states "August". It's a shame there's no day listed; late August would line up with the GSX re-release of 1.0 that I have in my posession, which has files dating up to around 1986-08-21, but it's possible the original GSS*CGI release did make it out in early August and they just also had a GSX version for... some reason.

I do not know of any such alternate driver kits; based on the use of GSS*CGI I expect that if they did exist they were just new drivers released by GSS. It's possible that Studio Software had an internal team who wrote GSS drivers like they did for GSX, but if so I have no surviving evidence of this.

I believe that this article should have one of the promotial images provided to me courtesy of the Computer History Museum (see gallery above) but I'm still trying to track down a copy to scan myself to confirm.

Studio Software Closure

Studio Software's end of business was announced in the 1987-03-17 issue (pages 107 and 112), with an article important enough to get a proper byline:

PC Publishing Firm Closes As Big Firms Take Center Stage
By Russell Glitman
IRVINE, CA—Studio Software Corp., one of the pioneering desktop-publishing software firms, has gone out of business.
Studio Software’s March 16 shutdown indicates that a winnowing may have begun in the booming desktop-publishing market, analysts said, as major players such as IBM and Xerox supplant the pioneer companies that blazed trails into the new market.
“A definite structural change is taking place in the market,” said Woodrow Vandever, executive vice president at InterConsult Inc., a Cambridge, Mass., marketresearch firm. “The large companies are entering the market.” Industry titans often enter the arena by forming alliances with smaller, pioneering firms, as Xerox did with its exclusive licensing agreement with Ventura Software Inc., of Morgan Hill, Calif., for its Ventura Publisher desktop-publishing application. Earlier this month, IBM teamed up with Adobe Systems Inc., of Palo Alto, Calif., to license its PostScript page-description language, software that shepherds data from a PC toa laser printer. “Strategic relationships are taking place, and the market is growing, but the problem is that small people who have not made the grade will find it more difficult,” said Mr. Vandever.
For Charles Morrissey, Studio Software's president, the larger implications of the closing lost significance as he spent last week winding down operations and consoling and counseling his 30 employees. “There's a lot of grief and anger when these things end,” he said.
Funding Cutoff
Studio shut down after the five venture-capital firms funding the company refused to funnel any more money into the company, despite statements made in January that an additional $1 million would be forthcoming.
The last hope for Studio, which began operations in 1982, vanished when ITT withdrew from acquisition talks it had been halfheartedly pursuing for three months.
The company’s demise was not sudden, and can be traced back to its failed bid to enter the stock market last fall, said Mr. Morrissey. Underwritten by the Dallas brokerage house of Webber, Hall, Sale & Associates, Studio Software's initial public offering (IPO) last September of 800,000 units failed to catch fire. The offer was withdrawn in November when it became clear the stock would not sell.
Resistance to the stock was largely due to Studio’s red bottom line.
“By the time it tried the IPO, the game was over,” said David Schecter, a vice president with Howmans, McGraw, Trull, Valeo & Co., a Boston-based brokerage house. “It was clear Studio didn’t have the muscle or any competitive advantage.”
Studio Software never closed a quarter with a profit and cost the venture capitalists more than $4.2 million during the five years of its troubled life. In its most recent fiscal year, which ended June 30, 1986, Studio’s revenue finally topped $1 million, but it still lost money.
Desperately seeking cash, Studio pegged its future on the stock offering, which was expected to earn the company more than $4 million. The funds were needed to market Studio’s latest product, FrontPage, a PC version of its original publishing package called Do-It. Studio sold a scant 1,500 copies of FrontPage since its introduction in June of last year.
“That failed IPO was the Snake River jump and we didn’t make it,” said Mr. Morrissey. “The timing would have been good and we would have been really mean.” If Studio had not pursued the stock market, “we would have moved faster to find other sources of revenue,” he said.
But, as it was, the money never came and Studio’s marketing campaign stalled, just as Xerox launched its Ventura Publisher series of ads and Aldus Corp., of Seattle, finally started shipping a version of its PageMaker desktop-publishing software for the PC.
Analysts agreed with Mr. Morrissey’s assessment of the desktop-publishing market as one that is about to become “brutally competitive.” To survive, smaller companies will either have to move into niche markets or align themselves with the larger new entrants that have the marketing muscle to compete.
But time is running out. “There are few candidates left,” said Ajit Kapoor, director of electronic publishing at Dataquest, a market-research firm in San Jose, Calif. “The longer [the pioneer firms] wait to form alliances, if they don’t have their own financial resources, the more likely they will become a candidate for the shakeout.”
Although Mr. Kapoor predicted that a number of firms may drop out of the market this year, that doesn’t mean the market is any less healthy, he said.
Studio's demise is the first rumble of the shakeout to come, said James Cavuoto, editor and publisher of the MicroPublishing Report in Redondo Beach, Calif.
“There will be three to five key competitors, and the rest will either be in niche markets or fall by the wayside like Studio has,” Mr. Cavuoto said.

This article provides a ton of details about SSC's life and death: their $4.2M loss, FrontPage having sold 1500 copies, SSC having 30 employees at closure, SSC never turning a profit, and the company lasting through March of 1986. I have no record of what happened between January and March. It's possible the developer that owned the disks I acquired quit in January, sensing the end being in sight; it would not surprise me if there was an air of fleeing a sinking ship given the files I recovered also included another developer's resume listing their time at Studio Software (made in FrontPage, of course).

But in general Studio Software seemed to be burning a lot of money on marketing for not a lot of sales. It's impossible to say why, of course. Maybe if their IPO had worked, or if they had gotten the venture capital infusion they were hoping for, they could have pulled things out, but their technical debt was immense and it seems likely to me they were about to be lapped by PageMaker et al, especially with Windows gathering momentum.

If anything, the most surprising thing is that they were seemingly briefly treated like a major player, but that time came and went very quickly.

The article is trailed by a chart showing SSC's financials, with the important numbers being:

1986 Revenue:

1986 Costs:

Net Loss: $1,319,232 Four Year Loss: $4.2 million

This also stated the DO-IT launch as "June 1985", which based on the disks I own is 1.02. I don't know what happened to 1.00 or 1.01 here; possibly those just weren't as widely distributed.

I also have absolutely no idea what hardware sales Studio Software was generating. Perhaps they resold computers, printers, etc. for use with their software?

The Fate of Studio Software

In the 1987-05-26 issue, PC Week ran this:

Studio Software Is Dead, But Its FrontPage Lives On
Haba/Arrays, a Macintosh software developer in Van Nuys, Calif., is moving into the desktop-publishing market by buying defunct Studio Software Corp., of Irvine, Calif. Last week, Haba/ Arrays paid an undisclosed amount for Studio Software, developer of FrontPage desktop-publishing software. Studio Software closed its doors on March 16 after a failed attempt to go public.
By buying the company, Haba/Arrays adds FrontPage to its product line. Haba/Arrays is also hiring some programmers and engineers who formerly worked at Studio. “We plan to be very aggressive in the PC desktop-publishing market,” said company President Chaz Haba, who said the firm will beef up FrontPage with new features, such as pull-down menus, instead of icons. “Our new version will be a direct competitor to Aldus PageMaker,” he said.

I can't find any evidence about Haba/Arrays ever releasing a desktop publishing package. They sold HabaWriter, which appeared to be mildly popular for its time, along with some supporting software like HabaSpell and a few minor things like HabaCheck.

That might be because the Washington Apple Pi Journal has this from 1987-05-23:

The company that owns the rights to /// EZ Pieces, by the way, Haba/Arrays appears to have gone completely belly-up. Their telephone number has been disconnected and there is no listing for them in the greater Los Angeles area.

So I have no idea what happened with the acquisition there, but it seems likely that Haba/Arrays never did much with FrontPage.

Pricing

Pricing for FrontPage seems to be fairly well defined, but pricing for DO-IT appears to be all over the place depending on who you ask and when. I don't know if some of these are wrong, if they kept changing it, or if this was a "we charge based on customer" situation and the prices are being reported by entities other than SSC themselves.

Ads

FrontPage itself ran ads in PC Week twice, on 1986-08-19 (page S/67) and 1986-10-07 (page 160). PC Week's page size is larger than my scanner, so forgive the seam visible at the edge where I had to stitch two halves together.

(Click for larger)

Also, I just love "THE LASER IS MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD". I agree, SSC.

1986-03-18: DO-IT gets mentioned by an ad for an AST EGA card (page 7). This ad using the full upper-case "DO-IT" supports my theory of "DO-IT" being the actual branding SSC used was as surely they'd want to tell their advertising partners the correct branding. But then there's other ads using "Front Page" so what do I know. (Repeated 1986-04-01 page 7, 1986-04-08 page 7, 1986-04-15 page 7, 1986-05-06 page 7, 1986-05-20 page 78)

1986-07-29: Torrington references DO-IT in the list of software that supports its mouse (page 111, repeated 1986-08-19 page S61; and repeated but with "Front Page" instead of "DO-IT" on 1986-09-16 page 140 and 1986-12-02 page 168)

1986-10-28: 47st Computers lists FrontPage in its desktop publishing category starting 1986-10-28 (page 144), repeating 1986-12-02.

1986-10-28:, AST announces a new "Premium Publisher" hardware bundle. They will not ship software with it, but will co-advertise with PageMaker, Ventura Publisher, and FrontPage (page 3). This would be followed up in the next issue, 1986-11-04 (page 14) and again in 1986-12-02 (page 84).

1986-11-18: DataCopy runs an ad for its scanners that includes a mention of FrontPage as supported, among others (page 183)

1986-11-25: AST runs an ad for its scanner that mentions FrontPage compatibility (page 7)

1987-02-10: AST runs a multi-page ad for the Premium Publisher bundle, and mentions as compatible "PageMaker,™ FrontPage,™ Ventura Publisher,™ Halo DPE,™ and Pagework™" (page C/42-C/43)

1987-04-21: Amdek runs an ad for its 1280 monitor that mentions FrontPage (page 144, repeated 1987-04-28 page 96, 1987-07-28 page S/43)

1987-05-19: AST runs an ad for its new TurboLaser printer, which was created on software from Studio Software (page 7, repeated 1987-07-21 poage 75).

Hardware and Software Support

Studio Software was promising everything to everyone, in true sales-first fashion. Here's some, grouped by my best knowledge of which came to fruition and which didn't:

Actually Supported

Planned or Never Supported

Citations

From June through December 1986, Studio Software comments on several articles related to desktop publishing:

They also provide comments in articles mentioned elsewhere in this page in 1986-06-03 page 120 (GSS*CGI), 1986-07-08 page 28 (FrontPage announcement), 1986-07-22 page 99 (IBM scanners), and 1987-03-17 page 107+112 (SSC closure).

Other References

Also from June through December 1986, PC Week starts (and then stops) referring to Studio Software as if they're one of the pillars of the market.

Editorials

In the 1986-01-07 issue, an editor complains of all the "-It" software out there and suggests "... One wonders whether some clever software company shouldn't put together an originality-in-software-naming package for the IBM PC. We propose calling it Stop It!"

This editorial also cites "Martin Marietta’s ItSoftware", which I'd never heard of. There's some references to it scattered around, but Martin Marietta still exists and "ITSoftware" is a rather generic term now, so specifics are hard to come by. But I feel vindicated learning that somebody did in fact use my idea of an "-It" suffixed office suite.

Conclusion

As I think it's a fitting end to this part of the tale, here's a quote from the company's president from 1987-03-17's desktop publishing marketing article:

“The marketing battle was too intense. Once Xerox got in and raised the ante, everyone had to belly up to the bar,” according to Charles Morrissey, president of Studio. “A tremendous amount of money is being spent on promotion. It was nice when we were alone.”