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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by User:SandyGeorgia 00:19, 14 January 2009 [1].

Scene7

[edit]
Nominator(s): Gary King (talk)

I'm nominating this article for featured article because there wasn't that much activity in the last FAC, so a consensus could not be formed. Hopefully the second time around is a bit better. Gary King (talk) 01:02, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment: The article is quite short; have all the available reliable sources been exhausted? The article seems to only cover corporate history and affiliated companies – for a comprehensive article on a company, one would hope for a section devoted to the company's products, comments on its management style and labour relations, as well as critical commentary on its actions and the quality of its services. To nitpick, is it possible to add URLs and bylines for those references that lack them? Thanks for writing the article, Skomorokh 01:14, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Yep, I've exhausted all references that I could find on the company. Most of what I haven't used are just press releases, primarily relating to business deals that the company has made with other companies (I've only mentioned a few in the article; we don't need them all). Also, references without URLs and/or bylines are because they don't have them, sometimes because they are press releases. Gary King (talk) 01:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
    Ah, I see, thanks. I'm concerned that the lack of comprehensiveness precludes this from being some of Wikipedia's best work, but that is no fault of yours. Skomorokh 03:50, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments
  • Scene7 products rely on several Adobe Systems products, including Adobe PhotoShop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Flex; this relationship existed even before Adobe purchased the company. - Remove "even".
  • Rather than maintain their own servers, since August 4, 2008, Scene7 rents storage space, allowing them to pay for only the resources that are used. - This sentence needs to be reworded, as I got stuck upon reading it.
  • National Business Furniture, a furniture retailer based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, implemented Scene7's technology on November 3, 2008, to allow visitors to the company's website to dynamically change the colors of product images. - Could this be reworded to avoid repetition of "to"?
  • The program was used to virtually preview room decoration projects before working on them, and allowed users to create virtual rooms, change walls, and arrange furniture, and render photo-realistic renderings of the completed designs. - "Render renderings"?
  • Adobe plans to integrate Scene7's products into Adobe LiveCycle, the company's suite of server software products. - When?

–Juliancolton Tropical Cyclone 03:09, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nice catches. All done. Gary King (talk) 03:22, 14 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Image review: All images appear to be fine. --Moni3 (talk) 23:18, 15 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Done Gary King (talk) 05:16, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments Leaning oppose Comprehensiveness, among other issues.
    • "The company, founded as a division of Autodesk, created a desktop CD-ROM program called Picture This Home in the mid-1990s." What is a "desktop CD-ROM program"? I've never heard that phrase before, and Google seems mystified as well. Why would a simple "program" not suffice? Also, this sentence only leaves readers wondering what Picture This Home is. At least give a few adjectives describing what this software does.
    • What was the company known as from the beginning (with Autodesk/Broderbund)?
    • "subsidiary of Adobe Systems,[1] which provides" Ambiguous which...seems to be referring to Adobe Systems instead of Scene7.
    • "to allow it to pay for only the resources that it uses." I don't understand this (rather unwieldy) add-on. Wouldn't maintaining one's own servers also mean paying for only the resources it uses? Presumably, the company wouldn't buy servers that it wouldn't use, right? "To allow it" is odd here.
    • "to combine their sales and marketing activities" A bit too generic business-speak. What does this mean?
    • "Fathead, a company that builds and sells wall graphics, used Scene7's services " Past tense, so they don't use it anymore? Might want to then give the time period in which they used it then.
    • "The company was founded as a division of Autodesk in San Rafael, California," Date?
    • The History section does not seem comprehensive to me. Among the many questions left unanswered: Why was it founded? What was Autodesk's vision for it? How successful was Picture This Home and the division in general at Autodesk? Why was it sold to Broderbund? Why did Broderbund want to buy it? What was its role at Broderbund? Why was it spun off into its own company? Besides the quotation from the CEO, there's no discussion of the company's role in the marketplace. The New York Times article ("Fast access brings virtual catalogs back") offers some good discussion about the growth potential of companies such as Scene7, and why high-speed Internet has led to the comeback of online catalogs, which were all the rage in the late-90s but never got anywhere because of slow connections.
    • "whole B2C market" Explanatory info in parens or brackets please.
    • "approach us to license the technology" What technology?
    • The first three paragraphs of History mostly deal with financing. There's no discussion on the company's health or growth. How was it doing in the advertising business? When did it start focusing on developing online stores/catalogs for clients?
    • "to help boost Adobe's overall services strategy,[2] especially its software as a service efforts." Good, but anything more specific on why Adobe wanted Scene7.
    • Are you sure there aren't more sources out there? My LexisNexis search yielded 410 hits. One of them was a substantive interview with Doug Mack discussing the problems of GoodHome.com in the online furniture market. BuddingJournalist 13:34, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I think I've got all of these points. I've expanded the article further. I got a few dozen hits, not 400+, but I used what I could find. I couldn't find that interview, but I think I did find a few useful statements and quotes from him, among other people related to the company. The server renting is a "pay as you grow" program that only requires Scene7 to pay for the resources that it uses. If the company rented a server, let's say it had to pay $1,000/month. On "pay as you grow", though, it would only pay for the storage space it uses, so if that's 10 GB, even though the computer can hold 100 GB, then it would pay $100 (10% of $1,000 for the entire server). I tried to explain that a bit better in the article. Gary King (talk) 19:55, 21 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • The history section is a much more fulfilling reading now.
  • "Mack later noted that while at Broderbund, there was a "big culture clash" between Broderbund, an established company, and GoodHome.com, a new media division." No need for "later". More importantly, this seems to contradict the previous sentence, which stated that Broderbund spun it off into a separate company, not an internal division.
  • "When asked how GoodHome.com managed to launch so quickly, Mack half-jokingly said, "We don't sleep," further noting that customers were the most important part of their business." Don't think this adds anything substantive (aren't customers the most important part of any business?).
  • "The phenomenon was dubbed" What phenomenon? Be more specific.
  • Several quotations are not immediately followed by a citation. Usually, "covering" citations are perfectly fine, but when dealing with exact quotations, it's best to cite them immediately at the end of the sentence (or quotation), so there's no ambiguity. Otherwise, later on, someone might add a sentence with a new source between the quotation and the "covering" citation, leading to trouble.
  • Discussion of Scene7 between its GoodHome.com phase and acquisition by Adobe is a bit scant. There's only information on deals and financing at the moment. What was its growth like? Was it profitable? What were its main products/services? BuddingJournalist 02:40, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Do we not know a more specific date for Picture This Home or the dev team's founding? BuddingJournalist 02:43, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
All done. I couldn't find much more information on what you wanted. There is at least double the amount of information available for GoodHome.com as there was for Scene7, perhaps partly because as Scene7, there were so many other companies like it that it was given less attention, and partly because they were more cautious this time around compared to as GoodHome.com, so there were less major announcements to make. Also, I think that the company probably never managed to pass its peak revenues of $1 million, which it reached while as GoodHome.com. I did find one article that talked about Mack's business plans while the company was Scene7, which I have added to the end of the first paragraph of "Reorganization". Gary King (talk) 03:21, 22 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Gary, I was wondering if you had access to ProQuest. I do, and if you need anything, I can provide text of articles for you. Dabomb87 (talk) 23:43, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Nope, I don't have ProQuest; is there anything interesting on there about Scene7 that isn't already in the article? Gary King (talk) 23:44, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
User:Dabomb87/Misc, may or may not help; if you find this stuff helpful I can give you more. Dabomb87 (talk) 23:50, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like mostly press releases to me; I've come across a lot of those, and I think the article already includes enough about the company's business deals. Gary King (talk) 23:56, 26 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, I was just checking because I noticed the concerns above; most of the hits do seem to be press releases. The only things I see that you don't have are a couple marginally relevant quotes that wouldn't add much anyway, they would be better served on Mack's article anyway. Dabomb87 (talk) 00:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support For the record, I made some copy-edits to the article but had no further role in its development. I am satisfied about the article's comprehensiveness, no outstanding prose and MOS issues remain, I trust that all images check out fine according to Moni3, and Ealdgyth said that sources looked OK at the previous FAC. Dabomb87 (talk) 00:14, 27 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose Tony (talk) 13:18, 3 January 2009 (UTC)—1a. My impression that it's a workaday topic wouldn't matter so much if it were better-written. Here are examples from a few random windows of the text. They indicate that a thorough massage is required by someone completely new to the article.[reply]

  • "Several companies, mostly retailers, use the company's services to showcase products on their websites and allow customers to interact with the products." I think "to" is needed before "allow" (changes the meaning subtlely).
  • Apart from an initial phrase and the refs, this text string starts both the lead and the first section: "Scene7 is an American on-demand rich media software company[1] that provides document hosting and interactive publishing services such as online catalogs, targeted email, video, and image management.[2]" The readers will switch off.
  • You don't need "US" for dollars in a US-related article.
  • "this relationship had already existed before Adobe purchased the company"—Spot the two redundant words.
  • "similar to the way that they would inspect merchandise in retail stores"—lose one word.
  • Was it the CEO who received the $30M, or the company?
  • Clunky: The decision to spin the company off as a separate entity was praised by Mack, who claimed, "We would have never been able to build our Web business if we were not in a separate building with separate funding." Unnecessary passive; Mack is in the background, so does not need another mention. "who" is laboured. Try this—He praised the decision to spin the company off as a separate entity: "We would have never been able to build our Web business if we were not in a separate building with separate funding." Remove "also" from the subsequent clause.
  • "spending $20 million on advertisements in its first year"—you're sure it was specific "ads", and not an overall promotional effort involving sponsorships and other strategies? "Advertising" might be safer, but check.
  • Too much of the quoted material is simply plucked out and shoved in here without proper scrutiny. Take this, for example: Mack decided that the company should target women in their 30s,[18] since "women make 80 percent of decorating decisions". The quoted causality explains only gender, not age group. Tony (talk) 07:40, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, I have copyedited the entire article. I think it's a lot better now. Gary King (talk) 23:07, 31 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support The article meets FA criteria, it is comprehensive and well referenced to the extent this subject can be referenced. More expansion would make the article too long and boring so I am against the addition of more info, it is fine right now. NancyHeise talk 03:47, 4 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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