Year end: AIR and RIAs raise Adobe's profile
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In the technology industry, you can be pretty sure you&#39;ve hit the big time when Microsoft develops a product specifically to compete with you.That&#39;s the position Adobe Systems found itself in this year, when Microsoft developed a&#160;new cross-platform browser technology called Silverlight&#160;to rival Adobe&#39;s Flash, the de facto standard for developing and delivering video and multimedia content on the Web.Adobe is exiting the year not only as the company of choice for creative professionals everywhere, but as an influential force to be reckoned with and a power player alongside Apple and Google, the companies leading the consumer-savvy, multimedia-friendly Internet wave of Web 2.0.Over its 25 years, Adobe -- a company known less for its dazzle than its dependability -- has quietly turned itself into a multibillion-dollar software vendor on the strength of technologies that have become essential to computer users. Creative professionals would be lost without the graphic-design tools Photoshop and Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat and PDF have made it easy for everyone to share documents cross-platform.But with its&#160;acquisition of Macromedia&#160;two years ago, Adobe also took on another role -- as pioneer of providing a next-generation platform for developing rich Internet applications. RIAs, as they&#39;re called, provide more intuitive and multimedia-rich user experiences on the Web than typical client/server or desktop applications, and are now in high demand as users expect more from their multimedia Web experiences with the rise in popularity of sites like YouTube and Facebook.Still, though the proud owner of PDF and Flash, two of the most ubiquitous technologies in the history of desktop computers, Adobe has never enjoyed the same powerful brand recognition as contemporaries that have also built widely used technology. While Google&#39;s search engine inspired the addition of the word &quot;google&quot; in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Adobe&#39;s technologies have always spoken louder than the company&#39;s name itself.&quot;Adobe is not a real sexy brand,&quot; acknowledged Keith Cutcliffe, a professional Web designer and developer who uses the company&#39;s software.Indeed, Anthony Franco, president of Denver-based application design and development firm EffectiveUI, said his company leads customer engagements by talking about the Flash Player, not necessarily Adobe itself, because the technology is so well known. &quot;It&#39;s the brand recognition of the Flash Player first, then we connect the dots,&quot; he said.But that has begun to change. Adobe took charge of the Macromedia acquisition this year, eliminating that company&#39;s brand and merging its own long-popular graphics tools with Web-design tools acquired from Macromedia,&#160;such as&#160;Dreamweaver and the aforementioned Flash, into Creative Suite 3.To Melissa Webster, program vice president at IDC, Adobe&#39;s purchase of Macromedia was &quot;more like a merger than an acquisition&quot; due to how gracefully Adobe integrated the technology and former Macromedia executives like Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch into the fold. She said the company&#39;s skillful execution of the deal also proved it is capable of making significant acquisitions work, which paves the way for more purchases in the future.Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst and founder of research firm ZapThink, said Adobe handled the Macromedia deal so smoothly and the acquisition merged such complementary technologies, &quot;it&#39;s almost hard to believe that Flash and the other [Macromedia products] were ever separate from Adobe products.&quot;This year Adobe also built a connection between the Web and the desktop by introducing the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a technology that leverages the Flash player to bring Web applications to the desktop using the same developer code. AIR, which is now in beta and will be available in full release early next year, will drive the company&#39;s strategy to move RIAs from the Web and bring the same user experience to the desktop.Microsoft with Silverlight aims, in a sense, to do the opposite. With technology built on the Windows Presentation Foundation graphics layer of the Vista OS, Microsoft hopes to&#160;enable its formidable .Net and Windows developer base to build RIAs. While Adobe has a solid lock on the RIA tools market for now, moving to the desktop and into the domain of Microsoft is a strategy that will pose challenges, said Toby Bell, research vice president at Gartner.&quot;It hasn&#39;t yet been proven that Adobe has the enterprise relationships and eco-system of partnerships [that Microsoft does],&quot; Bell said. &quot;All the things Microsoft brings to the table, Adobe is still developing.&quot;Adobe also marked a leadership transition in 2007, with longtime chairman and CEO&#160;Bruce Chizen stepping aside in a planned changing of the guard&#160;to let technologist Shantanu Narayen take over the company. Analysts said the transition should go smoothly because the two executives had been working so closely together before it happened on Adobe&#39;s long-term strategy.Narayen also brings to the company a &quot;developer/inventor enterprise-focused guy when Adobe is going to need that,&quot; Bell said. He added that while Adobe&#39;s top executives have never had that star factor of a Larry Ellison or Bill Gates, &quot;we have to expect [Narayen&#39;s] going to have enough personality to improve investor confidence and inspire Adobe to continue to innovate.&quot;Through all of these twists and turns, the company continues to thrive financially. Adobe closed out the year with yearly revenue up 23 percent for the year, beating Wall Street estimates and reaching nearly $1 billion in sales for its fiscal fourth quarter. Its yearly revenue of $3.16 billion and quarterly revenue of $911.2 million were both records for Adobe, which expects another year of double-digit percentage revenue growth in 2008.While there&#39;s no question Adobe made its own smart strategic moves in 2007, the company also benefited during the year from good timing, as RIAs came into their own and opened up a whole new market for any company that can help developers build them.EffectiveUI&#39;s Franco said that RIAs are no longer the realm of early adopters, which tend to be smaller companies that want to be seen as having cutting-edge design for their Web applications. &quot;Where we&#39;re seeing our biggest growth is ... large industry players leverage the Flash Player to build RIAs,&quot; he said. And with Adobe AIR, EffectiveUI is also able to bring those same Web applications to corporate desktops.Among EffectiveUI&#39;s customers are eBay, Dow Jones, and Viacom. The company also built a package-shipment and tracking system for United Airlines. Using Flash, the application replaced an old &quot;green screen&quot; terminal user-interface without replacing the back-end mainframe technology powering it, Franco said.This cross-platform power is another boon for Adobe as it does battle with Microsoft to control the content being delivered on the Web, which Cutcliffe said is key to being a market leader and influencer in the current, Web-driven technology market. Though Microsoft has built Silverlight to be cross-platform and work in all of the common Web browsers, Adobe has been working with Apple for years to optimize its products for the Mac, which is becoming a more popular platform in its own right.&quot;I still believe the ultimate goal is content control,&quot; he said. &quot;If your tool becomes the favorite tool of developers, you&#39;re going to control the content in the long run. ...I think Adobe has the advantage if somebody wants to get into developing applications that can be deployed both on Windows and on a Mac, or whatever type of an environment they&#39;re running.&quot;As RIAs themselves have more market value, Adobe also is positioning itself to compete in the enterprise with products like Adobe LiveCycle, which allows business customers to automate the business processes and workflow of PDF-based Web transactions, IDC&#39;s Webster said.LiveCycle provides support for asynchronous Web transactions, which is helpful for users who are providing information -- for example, to an insurance company -- online but don&#39;t have all the necessary information on hand to fill out the forms. LiveCycle allows users to go offline in the middle of filling out Web-based forms and return at a later time online back to where they left off, she said.&quot;With [LiveCycle] it&#39;s easy to move that form back online and connect that document back up to the point in the transaction where it went asynchronous,&quot; Webster said. &quot;It&#39;s a win for both sides.&quot;This is another area where Adobe runs into Microsoft, which aims to offer similar workflow automation through products in its 2007 Microsoft Office System, particularly through functionality in its SharePoint Server and InfoPath software. Now that its RIA strategy is sound, proving it&#39;s a worthy enterprise player through products like LiveCycle will be a critical area of focus for Adobe in 2008 as it competes in the technology market on a whole new level.
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Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced AdobeÂ® Photoshop Elements 3.0 for Macintosh, a major upgrade to its digital imaging software for photo hobbyists that makes it easier than ever to enhance images and transform photos.
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Software maker Adobe Systems Inc. has upgraded its flagship desktop publishing products, giving powerful new features to not only the authors of electronic documents but also their recipients.
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Adobe Systems Inc. , the top maker of graphic and Web design software, reported quarterly net profit rose 24 percent, powered by pent-up demand for upgrades to its two main product lines.
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Why Adobe's Apollo software could unleash the next wave of creativity and commerce.
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Software maker Adobe reported a strong financial finish to its 2007 fiscal year, with revenue up 23 percent for the year and 34 percent for the fourth quarter on sales of its Creative Suite 3 (CS3) and Acrobat software, the company said Monday.
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Adobe Systems Inc. is working to  deliver all of its software via the Web as a service rather  than a packaged product, but the transition to earn money from  subscriptions or advertising could take a decade.
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New projects and new deals boost Adobe's fortunes.
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Macromedia is heading in a new direction with the launch of a development tool for Flex, its development platform for rich internet applications (RIAs).
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AIR time And so to Barcelona for Adobe Max 2007 Europe, the company's developer conference, where we caught up with chief software architect Kevin Lynch.â¦
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Desktop publishing software maker Adobe Systems Inc. said Monday its fiscal fourth-quarter profit and sales rose to beat Wall Street's expectations, fueled by strong sales of Creative Suite 3 and Acrobat.
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Apple, Avid, and Adobe are leading actors on the digital video stage.
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Twelve months after its auspicious debut as a public beta, Adobe is ready to take the training wheels Photoshop Lightroom.
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Publishing-software giant Adobe Systems reported on Monday a slight seasonal decline in sales and profit amid strong overall growth.
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Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen spoke at the&#160;Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco,&#160;and IDG News Service had a chance to interview him before his appearance at the event. In this edited version of the conversation, Chizen spoke about Adobe&#39;s strategy for hosted software, its baby steps in the online advertising business, and its AIR technology for building desktop-based rich Internet applications.IDGNS: What is Web 2.0 to you, and what is Adobe&#39;s role in it?Chizen: To me, Web 2.0 is the realization of everything we talked about in the Web 1.0 era: The ability to take advantage of Web services, to have rich Internet applications, to have socialization and collaboration, to have hosted applications. These things were talked about but hard to do. Web 2.0 is the execution of that, and Adobe is the enabler of a lot of that experience.Most of the images on the Web have probably been touched by Photoshop. Most of the video is probably edited or enhanced with Premiere. Most of the animation and video playback is Flash. A lot of the rich Internet applications are being built with our Flex framework, taking advantage of Flash. The graphics [involve] Illustrator, and on and on.IDGNS: It seems that in recent months, the Adobe story has gotten more complicated than it was a few years ago as the company moves into new areas and technologies like hosted applications. Are you concerned that this might confuse and alienate existing customers?Chizen: Your perception is accurate. Our business has gotten more complex and more diversified. As a company that has been growing 20 to 30 percent a year, in order for us to sustain that growth, we need to address more customers with different products and solutions. But our mission hasn&#39;t changed for the past 25 years: To help enable the communication of rich ideas and information in a reliable, compelling, engaging manner.Twenty-five years ago we did that on paper with [printing technology] PostScript. What has changed is the world around us: More people are trying to communicate more information than ever before, so we&#39;re able to address more markets.Am I concerned we&#39;ll be alienating our current customers? No. As long as we continue to serve their needs, we&#39;ll be okay.IDGNS: Do you currently generate any revenue from online ads?Chizen: A very tiny amount today via a hosted application called Premiere Express. It lets consumers do simple video editing. We offer it through partners like Photobucket [and MTV]. Some of those business models are advertising-based. We&#39;ll continue to experiment.Our Adobe Media Player [now in beta] is also an ad-based business model. We enable broadcasters and content providers to make money on their content through a very clever advertising user interface. We&#39;re also working on a Photoshop Express, which will let consumers do image editing. It&#39;ll be either ad-based or subscription-based.IDGNS: Do you foresee online ad revenue becoming a noticeable part of Adobe&#39;s revenue mix?Chizen: It depends on how many years you look ahead. Many of our core customers care so much about the quality of the information that they&#39;re trying to provide that they want their solutions to be unencumbered and won&#39;t put up with advertising. But there will be more casual users who will want our capabilities but not pay directly for it, and that&#39;s where you&#39;ll see advertising.IDGNS: Do you offer any of your packaged software products in full-featured but hosted versions?Chizen: No, we don&#39;t.IDGNS: Will there come a time when your full-featured products will be offered as a hosted SaaS (software-as-a-service) model?Chizen: Yes, but over time. To benefit from a full-featured version of Photoshop, the experience as a hosted application wouldn&#39;t be very good, and that&#39;s because of bandwidth speeds. The capability of broadband doesn&#39;t equate to what you can get from your local computer.You&#39;ll see us do hybrid applications that take advantage of the desktop, but where appropriate, we&#39;ll provide hosted functionality for things like sharing. Our Kuler [web-hosted application] lets people collaborate using different color settings, [and works in conjunction with] producs like Illustrator, which resides on the desktop.That&#39;s going to happen over the next number of years: We&#39;ll have these hybrid environments for full-featured applications. As broadband gets greater and greater, there&#39;s the possibility of taking the desktop app and moving it to the host. Five years is probably the minimum.But the capability of the desktop and laptop is advancing so quickly ... and broadband capability isn&#39;t increasing that rapidly. Even if it increased that rapidly, people are throwing more data into the pipes, which will slow down the delivery of the information.IDGNS: So you&#39;re seeing interest from users in hosted software that simplifies workgroup collaboration?Chizen: For more casual users, we&#39;ll have hosted services. We announced a service recently called Share [in beta version], which lets you extend what Acrobat does or what the Adobe Reader does -- document sharing, PDF creation, word processing -- which will all be hosted, but you&#39;re still going to want to do a lot of things on your desktop.IDGNS: Do you agree the future of software delivery is that SaaS/hosted model?Chizen: Eventually. The key is how long does that take. It depends on the application and on broadband capabilities. I&#39;m smart enough to say that will be in 20 years probably.[Chizen later said during his presentation at the conference that he foresaw the Adobe software delivery model changing from packaged applications to SaaS about 10 years from now.]IDGNS: Does the SaaS/hosted model also present a threat to Adobe if stealthy competitors develop from the ground up as hosted software and offer some credible competitors to Adobe packaged applications?Chizen: Any shift of delivery model or business model is a threat to any company like Adobe that makes a lot of their revenue selling desktop software. It&#39;s up to us to make sure that as the environment is capable of delivering functionality to users, that Adobe is there before anyone else.What we&#39;ve done in video editing with Premiere Express, what we&#39;re doing with Photoshop Express with Share, what we do today with PDF creation online are great examples of Adobe being ahead of others in taking advantage of the changing landscape.IDGNS: When did Adobe develop a sense of urgency for reacting to the SaaS trend?Chizen: Back in the first dot-com wave is when we became sensitive to it, and we developed Create PDF Online. I&#39;d say it was a little over two years ago when we got a sense of urgency around it. Our first major hosted application was the Acrobat Connect real-time conferencing product.IDGNS: You&#39;re in the process of&#160;acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, maker of the Buzzword hosted word processing application. Are you interested in having hosted spreadsheet and presentation applications and forming an office productivity suite?Chizen: Spreadsheet, probably not, but the presentation application is intriguing. The trick is to develop one or acquire one where we believe we&#39;re differentiated by leveraging the AIR platform. What excited us about Buzzword wasn&#39;t being in the word processing business but that it&#39;s a great example of what AIR can do. It also fits really nicely into our Acrobat document collaboration strategy.IDGNS: Do you see Adobe competing against Google&#39;s Apps suite of communication and collaboration hosted software and against Microsoft Office?Chizen: It&#39;s more about offering the service to someone who is already collaborating with PDF documents, sharing their documents, or protecting their documents with us online and who wants to be able to edit or create a document. We&#39;re not looking to target the serious word-processing Office user, but for those people who are in our ecosystem, involved in a collaborative workflow, we want to make sure we can address their needs.IDGNS: Why is the AIR approach preferable to building an offline component for browser-based applications along the lines of what Google is doing with Google Gears?Chizen: For some applications, the browser is great, and having offline capabilities will be a great extension. But for other applications, we want complete control over the user experience [and the browser is inadequate.]That&#39;s where we really differentiate: The ability to go a little further in local capabilities, the ability to drag and drop easily from the desktop to the application and back. Those things would be tough to do with a browser. And some applications, you want to stay in them and don&#39;t want to be encumbered by a browser. You want local presence, and that&#39;s where we really shine.IDGNS: What&#39;s your latest take on Microsoft&#39;s Silverlight plug-in for delivering video and interactive graphics on the Web like Flash?Chizen: It appears to be trying to imitate the Flash player: It runs in the browser and is designed for interactivity, animation, and video. Fortunately, we&#39;ve had a 10-year head start, and we have a complete ecosystem around Flash.We&#39;re on 99.1 percent of all computers and on 300 million non-PC devices. More than 70 percent of video is streamed through Flash player. Millions of developers and designers use Adobe tools.It&#39;s going to take Microsoft a long time to catch up, we believe. In the meantime, we continue to advance Flash, and we&#39;re working on AIR. I take Microsoft seriously, but we&#39;re in pretty good shape.
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Users of Adobe's programs are taking issue with an apparent feature within the company's products that is sending out some type of data to an outside service.
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Blog: Online-commerce giant releases faster APIs, shows off desktop application written with Adobe Systems' AIR.