Adobe's Linux challenge
Published: 23 Feb 2005 13:50 GMT
How did you change the mindset within Adobe toward catering to big companies? Isn't that a major shift for you?
Well, it's a shift. This is going to sound strange at first, but I think about a company like Honda and what they were able to do over time. They build great engines and have an excellent manufacturing processes. That's their core competency and they figured out how to grow from a lawn tools company to a motor scooter company to a motorcycle company to a small car manufacturer, to a large car manufacturer, to luxury car manufacturer. And now they're manufacturing jet engines and they're working with GE on a small personal aircraft.
Well, the same is kind of true with Adobe. We went from being a provider of PostScript and printing systems to providing solutions for creative professionals... for digital photography, and now we're providing solutions to the enterprise. We've had to change some of the ways in which we sell, we've had to change the way we do business in terms of contracts, financial terms, partnerships, how we advertise our products. But quite frankly it's no different than the transformation we had to go through when we went from being a PostScript company to being a shrink-wrapped applications software company.
Sticking with the analogy, what do you see as your Honda-like core competency?
It's software that helps people and organisations communicate better, and when I say better, it's where the information needs to be more impactful, more reliable, more secure. It's where the presentation of the information is important.
There was a lot made of Microsoft's decision to get into the electronic forms market and the potential for head-to-head competition with Adobe. Have you seen any increase competition with Microsoft as a result of products like InfoPath?
I don't think so. At least, we don't hear much about their current offering. I don't hear much about (Microsoft's) success with products like InfoPath and I don't think it really met the target... I do believe that as they make progress, or try to make progress with the long-haul components, that they will look to do more things similar to what we do today with PDF.
We have been at this now for about 10 years and PDF has become such a standard around the world that it is going to be really hard for many organisations to change their mission-critical workflows. If you just look at the number of government agencies around the world that already encourage the use of PDF and accept it as a de facto standard, it's pretty hard for me to see how Microsoft's going to come in and just unseat all those workflows. But they are Microsoft and they do have $40bn in revenue.
They do have a platform advantage, right?
They do have a platform advantage. They do have a monopoly; that's what the Justice Department said. But, you know, I think we're in pretty good shape.
While we are on the subject of competitors, what about Apple? Do you see Apple as a competitor? Partner? Both?
They are clearly both a partner and in some cases a competitor. They're an important partner in that about 25 percent of our business comes from people who own Macs. That's a very loyal customer to Adobe and a very important customer as well. That's also a very important customer obviously to Apple. So it's in both of our best interests to partner, and I think we do a pretty good job of it. If you look at which software company had more OS X applications available before anybody else, it was Adobe. If you look at how we optimised for that platform, it's probably more so with Adobe than anybody else, we're probably the largest ISV (independent software vendor) for the Mac. There are some places where we do compete... in particular in video, and we have agreed to compete. And we compete ferociously.
Previous
Did you find this article useful?
219 out of 369 people found this useful
- Share this article:
