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It's an imaginative combination that brings the maker of Flash animation software together with the creators of the PDF (Portable Document Format) technology for presenting text files online. What with content developers hungry for new tools to use in the fast-changing world of multimedia, Adobe has set up a near-impregnable position.
At least on paper.
This sort of stuff is notoriously tricky, and the history of the software industry is littered with the detritus that remains from once grand ambitions gone astray--the most famous failure being Ray Noorda's quixotic attempt to refashion Novell by acquiring companies he believed would help him battle Microsoft on several different fronts. Novell has never recovered.
Chizen says he knows what he's up against and remains convinced that the Macromedia acquisition was the right move for both companies. CNET News.com recently met with Chizen to talk about the business and how he views the evolution of the technology world.
Q: Certain investors filed suit after the Macromedia announcement. What can you say about the lawsuit?
Chizen: We think it is totally frivolous and has no merit whatsoever. I can't comment further on it, but customers, the investors, everybody, were asking what took us so long to do the deal. It was so obvious.
Well, not everyone. For whatever it's worth, we heard Jim Cramer on his CNBC show, and he didn't sound thrilled.
Chizen: Yeah, but other than Jim? If you read most of the sites and most of the blogs, there's the usual concern with customers asking whether we still will maintain their product after the merger.
A lot of the concern has to do with the integration of the two companies into one. This is probably the trickiest merger that you guys are attempting to consummate since Aldus.
Chizen: From a financial perspective, yes. But if you look at Macromedia--we understand each other's businesses and we've been watching one another for many, many years. Also, they are local. Many of the Adobe employees and many of the Macromedia employees live on the (Bay area) peninsula, so getting from one place to the other is pretty easy.
But what about the potential issues you're going to face to make the combination work?
Chizen: Any acquisition is hard. I think anybody who tells you acquisitions are easy or mergers are easy is lying. They aren't easy. But we're going about it with our eyes open.
What's different about the climate these days with all the consolidation going on in the industry? Was your thinking in doing the Macromedia deal that you need to be a certain size or you can't make it?
Chizen: I don't believe scale really buys you anything.
So what convinced you to go after Macromedia?
Chizen: Every year we go through our previous strategy plan...When we sat down this year, we talked about how to give users more of a rich experience, more animation, more graphics, more video and more collaboration around Acrobat. Then we took a look at Macromedia and said, "Jeez, if we had Macromedia as part of our asset base, we could speed up our execution against our strategy." Without that, we might have been late. That was driving me more than scale.
Is it because growth is slowing down for software companies?
Chizen: Not for us. But growth is slowing down for a lot of software companies who were charging multiple millions of dollars to do back-end, infrastructure stuff. Back when money was free, a lot of IT guys had bosses telling them, "Whatever it takes, get it done." They would spend $40 million on an ERP system or an HR system or a CRM system. Now the IT guy is saying, "Hey, we got burnt. We're not doing that any longer."
We recently spoke with the CEO of Texas Instruments, and he said he expects stronger growth coming from demand for non-PC computing devices. How do you see the next five years shaping up in terms of this PC versus alternative device debate?
Chizen: My view is (that) more people will view, consume and interact with information on non-PC devices than PC devices. It is going to be less on a PC and more on mobile devices. Two to four years from now it will be through an HDTV that has a satellite box or a video game or a cable box or maybe just natively has computing capability.
What does that mean for Adobe?
Chizen: It means that even though most of our customers will want to create and manage and deliver that information using their PC, we have to make sure that that information can easily be consumed on a non-PC. We're doing a little bit of that today with the Adobe Reader in Japan, so we make some money there.
Does that suggest a change in what your customers use to create content?
Chizen: Most of our constituents will still use their PCs to create that information because the CPU horsepower is still going to be better for sophisticated creators of information.
In the battle between media players, is the standards issue again going to be an impediment?
Chizen: We'll support every format that makes sense. Many of our
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longer care about the basic consumer, so I have just about deleted
all Adobe programs from my Macs and PC's. And I won't be
updating to any new Adobe versions of the Macromedia products. I
just don't have the needs or time or income to spend learning my
way through the various overbloated Adobe programs.
Now I'll have to find a replacement for Dreamweaver. The Adobe merger is the kiss of death for it. Any company that thinks posting PDFs on the web is a good idea can't possibly respect the best compliant authoring tool in the business.
Macromedia has always considered compliance with web standards and accessibility for persons with disability when crafting their products, while Adobe seems as if it couldn't care less about either issue.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid it's only a matter of time before Adobe's influence spoils Dreamweaver. If I can't find a replacement, guess it's back to Notepad for me.
Macromedia has demonstrated a superior understanding of the internet and the designers and developers who live and work there.
Adobe never really got past the print world to embrace the purely digital world.
Bruce, please take a page from Howard's book and now that you have hired the best people listen to them, empower them, and stay out of their way.
Their products are primarily made for professionals who use their products in a production environment. We do not have the time to be continually "relearning" software that we have been using for years. To do anything other than to provide their products users with "tweaks" and "enhancements" would be a diservice to the very people that are Adobe's bread and butter customers.
Adobe has always paid very close attention to the needs of their core users and I am confident they will continue to do so. For those critics who fear that they have become complacent and are resting on their laurels you need to be reminded of a fundamental reality.
Adobes products are used by printhouses, publishers, TV studios, radio stations, movie studios, professional photographers, web developers, etc. etc. Their products are used all day long by many of these people, myself included. When there is such a large professional user base for your products, where people are earning their livelyhood based on the usability and reliabilty of your products, you better make damned sure that the vast majority of them are going to appreciate the changes that you make to their tools. Otherwise, you are just going to end up with a lot of PO'd customers who will start looking elsewhere for their tool sets.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it seems to be Adobe's approach and I and thousands of other professional users are pleased that they do so. I'm not saying their products are perfect, they aren't (Golive and Illustrator cases in point). But Adobe knows who there core customers are, they listen to what they want and need, and provide them with just enough improvements at a time to keep them satisfied and willing to keep coming back for more.
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