Letter from France
from
Jacques Gauchey
Tuesday, Aug 29, 1995
Besides the hot weather, multimedia and the Internet are the favorite talk of the nation this summer in Paris. Many newspapers and weekly magazines are loaded with feature stories on the World Wide Web. I wonder if this is encouraged by the French government which would love people to forget about nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
Multimedia is indeed the international language. The best proof is that the French who have a translation for everything-including the word computer-have not created a word for multimedia. They simply call it "les multimedia." And French left bank intellectuals love to talk about the hidden and existentialist sides of multimedia, new media and the Internet.
They describe multimedia as "the ship to explore cyberspace." It's not the Spanish Armada yet: only 15% of French homes have PCs, compared to 25% in Germany and about 35% in California. Of this fifteen percent, 5% are in cellars, obsolete machines collecting dust under the bottles of wine. This leaves us with only about 400,000 operational CD-ROM drives. Only 600 CDROM titles are available on the French market, if you exclude erotic titles, versus 4,000 in the US. But Gallic enthusiasm does the rest: 1.2 million CDROM titles were sold last year.
A single title,
Le Louvre,
has already sold 50,000 copies this year, an all time record in France. According to some projections, 4 million titles will be sold next year. My observation, derived not from a quick passage through France, but as a multimedia consultant dealing in part with Europe, is that creativity is stunning in France, particularly in the educational and consumer markets. Also, quite a few games created in France are distributed in the US as American titles (including Cryo's Dune, Conspiracy, and Time Cop). And, several French multimedia companies, needing the critical mass of the US market, have satellite offices in California such as UbiSoft, SRC Group, MilleMedias/Syrinx, I-Motion (Infogramme), and Matra Hachette Multimedia. Multimedia is alive and well in France.
©1995 Jacques Gauchey. Jacques Gauchey is the author of
La Vallee du Risque - Silicon Valley,
a book on long term technology trends (Plon, Paris, 1990) and an international consultant in the New Media industry. His firm, G.a Communications, assists companies and the international investment community in setting-up their global multimedia strategies both in America and in Europe. Jacques is frequently asked to speak about New Media trends. His clients include Apple Computer; Dynaware USA; Governement of the Grand-Duchy of Luxembourg; and Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon Technopole. Contact him by email:
Jacques Gauchey.
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