B&C: Hi Jacques, first of all, thank you for this interview. Can you explain to our readers what your position and roles are at WinZip Computing?
JL: Hello! I'm Director of Product Management and Marketing at WinZip. I work with the development team to identify software priorities, monitor technology trends and user requests, as well as work with our sales team to market WinZip.
B&C: WinZip was very popular some years ago, because of it was the progenitor of all file archiver and compressor software products. But today WinZip has a lot of contenders, like WinRar (shareware) and 7Zip (open source). Netscape Navigator, despite was the best browser, has been devastated by the freeware contenders, like Internet Explorer. What are you doing to remain competitive?
JL: Let me assure you that with more than a billion downloads, WinZip remains one of the software industry’s most popular applications. Every month, millions of people download WinZip on their favorite device or turn to our ZipSend and ZipShare services to easily and securely share and deliver information. A few years ago we realized that the reason for file zipping was changing. When WinZip started, people mainly used zip files to save space on their hard drives, which were expensive at the time. Today, the situation has changed dramatically since storage costs have dropped to practically nothing. Among our loyal customer base – primarily businesses accounts and mainstream, everyday consumers – more and more people are realizing that the greatest benefits of the zip format come when you’re sharing files. Smaller files, faster upload/download, compatible across platforms, unlimited size, the ability to batch together many files, and encryption for extra security make zip an ideal format for file sharing. So unlike other compression apps that tend to focus on freeware or areas of the fringes of the market, we’ve dramatically evolved WinZip from being a compression tool to what I'd argue is the most powerful and modern file sharing application available for business and everyday users. With one app, you can convert files on the fly, secure them quickly and easily, and share them regardless of size via email, social media, or the major cloud storage services. This provides a huge value to our users. Today, compression is just one of many features in WinZip. File sharing is now the core of the product – I invite you to try it for yourself!
B&C: What do you think about Microsoft decision to integrate a Zip compressor in Windows? Nero AG didn't agree the decision to integrate a burning utility, for example. By the way, did you ever think to make the Standard version a Freeware software?
JL: We're thrilled that Microsoft has added a zip compressor in Windows. That means more zip files for us to unzip! And since Zip capabilities in Windows are very limited – no support for large zips, no support for password protected zips, no support for split zips, no support for other compression formats, and most important, archaic file sharing features – that makes us more relevant than ever!
Regarding your freeware questions, we pack so much more value in Winzip than any other compression tool and offer a more productive file sharing experience (even outside the world of compression). From a business perspective, turning WinZip into freeware just doesn’t make sense. WinZip wins 4 and 5 star reviews, including sites like PC Mag (Editors’ Choice), CNET, and most importantly, from our own users on sites like Amazon. Our users realize that they get what they pay for. With WinZip, customers get a tremendous value that goes well beyond what shareware offers.
B&C: WinZip has a lot of features, like social networks file sharing and PDF document conversion. Have these features been integrated because of a customers request, or are these features a marketing choice (Facebook and Twitter are very popular)?
JL: Our software development priorities are driven primarily by a keen awareness that our number one purpose is to help people be more productive. As a result, our development priorities come from a variety of sources. First, we constantly monitor user requests for new features. For example, our scheduled Cloud Backup feature in WinZip Pro and our first version of WinZip Enterprise which will integrate with SharePoint and Amazon S3 were both inspired by customer requests. Second, we collaborate closely with chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD to constantly tweak the performance of our core engine to get better performance. Third, we’re always looking for ways to simplify user workflows. That's why version 18 combines the create/share ribbons and also introduces the new WinZip Express Add-ons. Both dramatically reduce click counts and accelerate task completion. In the case of the WinZip Express Add-ons, we’re offering users a single, simple dialog box where you can perform WinZip's most used sharing tasks at the click of the mouse. Finally, we track industry trends that indicate where our users are going. That's one of the reasons why we’ve been so aggressive in supporting cloud storage services.
B&C: WinZip doesn't integrate a built-in benchmark on the contrary of WinRar and 7Zip. So hardware reviewers used to utilize the rival software in their CPU reviews. Do you think that it's a great lack in the eyes of marketing?
JL: Absolutely not. As I mentioned, we’re always working on our compression performance in collaboration with chip vendors like AMD and Intel and if you look at the leading benchmarks from third-party sites, we consistently rank either 1st or 2nd in compression. Recent releases have also noticeably boosted our performance. At the same time, we don't want to put all our resources into the diminishing returns exercise of trying to squeeze 1 or 2 micro-seconds out of every gigabyte. In our view, it’s much more important to focus on the big picture – making our users more productive in their file conversion, sharing, backup, and collaboration tasks.
B&C: WinZip 18 has improved the OpenCL support. Can you tell us what kind of improvements have you integrated? Are these available by the Intel GPUs?
JL: We've seen significant performance improvements with OpenCL support (see below). We have adopted OpenCL for both AMD and Intel CPUs and GPUs and are looking at going even further with these hardware partners to maximize our performance. You can find some benchmarks regarding our OpenCL support in the AMD blog here.
B&C: Also, you said that WinZip will support the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) program. Can you reveal in advance something about it? Will you support CUDA too?
JL: We're working on HSA right now so it's too early to make any comments and for the time being, we don't have any announcements regarding CUDA.
B&C: WinZip is available in the Play Store and in the AppStore, but seems to be not a success. Is it essential a professional compressor software in these mainstream mobile devices?
JL: Actually, our WinZip apps have been a very successful venture for us. On iOS, we’ve seen millions of downloads and have held the first and second position in "compression" in the iTunes store. With WinZip for Windows 8, we’re the only app in the compression category, we hold the third position in “Productivity” apps and we’re a top 50 Windows 8 app overall. Our Android app has been well received with more than a million downloads. We’re proud of these terrific results. Most importantly, with apps for every major platform – Windows, Mac, Windows 8, iOS and Android – we’re offering customers access to the power of WinZip across all their favorite devices and systems.
B&C: WinZip has a lot of powerful customers, like Federal Bureau of Investigation, Social Security Administration and Department of Defense. How important is this business/Government market compared with the mainstream one?
JL: While we don’t comment on specific clients, I can tell you that both our enterprise and consumer customers are very important to our business.
B&C: Thank you Jacques, it has been a pleasure talking with you.
JL: Same here! Thank you.