>
>
>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