JD pointed out that Knowledge@Wharton has an article with Bruce Chizen, the CEO of Adobe and it covers the merger, the future, the technologies, and sheds some light on what the direction of Adobe is going to be.
One of the more interesting parts of the article is when Chizen talks about PDF in terms of the revenue stream. He paints a picture of Adobe living on borrowed time with PDF. It was an open standard that they knew was going to be easily copied, so they tried to make it more robust and create some value-added services around it. It’s been a sound (although not spectacular) business model, and it gives some insight into the man who will be driving the products we all know and love.
I think it’s good. I think Bruce is good at seeing beyond the potential of a technology and figuring out how money can be made off of it. What can make it ?real? and viable. With Flash they seem to be treating the “ubiquitous client” as the value added piece. We know they’re giving the Flex framework away for free, and after reading the article, I think it’s clearer that they?re looking to Apollo as the significant source of revenue. What that means for pricing I’m in no position to speculate.
The parts about the merger were also eye-opening. I think Bruce was put on the offensive a little bit when asked about the large number of Macromedia employees in senior positions. He made the right decision of course, but his response was interesting. Bruce knows that acquiring Macromedia was a great business decision and that the combined company has a lot of potential. They’re in verticals that are high growth and they have products that make a big impact in those verticals. Mobile, Video, Web, Adobe has it covered because they bought Macromedia. Before that, they weren?t covered as well.
This is a candid look at the CEO. There’s definitely some CEO-spin in there, but even when you cut through the marketing hype you can see that Bruce has a vision for Adobe and that we as developers play a big part of that vision. Adobe is well positioned to make the leap, and the time is ripe. I hope Adobe becomes a big player, and I hope Adobe really has the guts to change the web. There’s a lot at stake.
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