Adobe reinvents itself in order to thrive in new markets

Rethink IT, March, 2005 by Peter White

Adobe now has to hope that the enterprise will be equally impressed by these qualities that are vital in the publishing sector, and to persuade them that important qualities--such as consistency and reliability of data that is sent around the corporation--will be delivered by Adobe's architecture on an enterprise scale.

OPEN SOURCE

Another major decision for Adobe, like most software houses that control key building block products, is whether, or how far, to go the open source route. It has been getting more embroiled in the desktop Linux world, but has no clear plans to open source its key architectures, PostScript, PDF and Type 1 font formats. Adobe publishes all these specifications to make them open, but retains full control and has not submitted them either to standards bodies or open source processes. This achieves the right balance, Chizen claims, of profitability for Adobe and widespread uptake in the community.

"Once something becomes a standard driven by a standards body, it moves at a glacial pace. And innovation slows down significantly because you have to get everybody to agree and there's lots of compromise. If you make it totally open source, you don't get a return on investment. We believe that by opening up the specification, we allow other people to take advantage of it. But because we still own the source, we get to innovate around that standard more quickly than anybody else."

NEW INTEREST IN LINUX

However, last fall Adobe suggested that it might take a more flexible stance, and signalled new interest in Linux when it joined a prominent open source consortium, Open Source Development Labs, the employer of Linux inventor Linus Torvalds. It advertised for a director of Linux market development to "identify and evaluate strategies for Adobe in the Linux and open source desktop market" and to identify projects that "will help improve Linux as a desktop environment."

It did not go as far as to commit to bring its graphics software to Linux, but the more direct involvement and the wish to win Linux partners reflects the growing significance of the operating system on the enterprise desktop.

Adobe also hired a senior computer scientist to be "maintainer and/or architect for one or more Adobe-sponsored open source projects". However, Adobe did say the company doesn't think there are enough customers today to justify selling Linux versions of its Photoshop or Illustrator graphics programs. "From a technical maturity perspective, the (Linux) platform is robust. From a business perspective, the platform has probably not achieved a scale that is aligned with most of Adobe's markets," said an executive. At the low end there are many free graphics applications, while at the high end, the market is small outside the Mac and Windows platforms. However, Adobe may need to incorporate Linux in order to justify its multiplatform claims for the enterprise and support full corporate rollouts over different operating systems.

Adobe may be geared up for the enterprise, but its biggest drivers are still coming from its traditional markets. In the second half of 2004, it saw the important 50% growth in intelligent documents, but its strongest individual product was the Creative Suite, centered on Photoshop, with the company picking strong headway against its most traditional of rivals, Quark, as one of its highlight achievements, taking it into major publishing organizations such as Hearst.