Adobe's Linux challenge
Published: 23 Feb 2005 13:50 GMT
Has that percentage of your business from Mac users been pretty much holding steady?
For Adobe holistically, it's decreased. A big reason for that is the success that we've had with Acrobat and the enterprise business because that is predominantly a Windows business.
What about Adobe's plans on Linux? We reported last autumn that Adobe was recruiting a head of Linux market development, and I know that you announced a Linux version of Acrobat Reader recently. Is that just a toe in the Linux water at this point? Or is there enough demand for Linux versions of your other products?
Yes, so first of all most of our [software products] that we make available at the enterprise level will work on top of Linux. In terms of Linux desktop, that is one where I think you characterised it correctly. We're dipping our toes in the water, we're listening to our customers and we're watching and we are trying to learn. We are looking at what other applications might make sense. The reality is, today, other than some vertical markets and some emerging markets, there aren't a lot of corporations that have moved to a Linux desktop. So we're listening to our customers, we're trying to understand if they're going to move and when. We see a lot of people who were traditionally on Unix workstations doing video type of work, moving to Linux. We see a lot of people who have vertical applications, manufacturing, customer service, move, and then we're seeing some government agencies around the world move, but we’re not seeing a lot of our traditional customers moving.
So, what products that might make sense there? Would that be things like Photoshop?
What we're trying to do is look at who is moving to a Linux workflow and then say, "OK, what applications will they require?" If you're a government agency a bank or insurance company or any other large enterprise and your citizens or your customers or potential customers for whatever reason have a Linux desktop, you want to make sure that the document that they're trying to interact with works well. You want to make sure that you support the ability to save the information so all of the rich capability we have in the current Adobe Reader for Windows and Mac, you will see on Linux, and that will interface with our server products so that's absolutely something we will do and are in the process of doing.
That's a definite plan on that?
That's a definite plan. It looks like adoption of Linux seems to be happening more with the business community than the creative professional. There's still a lot of Macintosh users there... people who are very comfortable with their operating systems. So there's not a compelling reason to switch. I think the one place where we're seeing switching going on a little bit is in some of the emerging markets like India and China. But quite frankly, for us those are relatively small markets because of some of the piracy issues.
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