Software maker looks to video, mobile
Source: Mercury News
Written By John Boudreau
To Bruce Chizen, the stylishly bald chief executive of Adobe Systems, a bottle of water is more than a bottle of water. It’s Adobe water.
An action movie is more than a Hollywood hit. It’s an Adobe hit. A magazine fashion spread? An Adobe magazine layout.
“We are everywhere you look,” he says, referring to the San Jose company’s design and digital video special effects software, used universally in creative fields. “Whether it’s a logo on a bottle label, an effect in a movie, a TV commercial, an image on a Web site, a layout in a newspaper or a picture in a magazine — there is a high probability that the content was touched by Adobe.”
“We’ve had that kind of influence on society,” says Chizen, who then takes a sip from a bottle of water.
The exuberant software executive looks and sounds like a man who has just collected on a winning bet.
Though lacking the name recognition of, say, Microsoft, Adobe has products that are almost as ubiquitous as those of the software giant.
Adobe’s Portable Document Format, or PDF, which lets people create and view digital documents in their original form, sits on more computers than Windows does, the company likes to say. That’s because it runs on all operating systems, not just Windows. Adobe estimates that between 500 million and a billion computers worldwide use PDF.
Adobe’s move in April to acquire rival Macromedia of San Francisco for $3.4 billion in stock is designed to give it Microsoft-like dominance in software to produce, edit and display digital documents and video on a range of devices, from personal computers to cell phones. Macromedia’s Flash technology, used for creating and playing animated Web pages, is ubiquitous on the Internet and is embedded in millions of mobile phones. The deal is expected to be completed in the fall.
By adding Macromedia’s video technology, Adobe believes it will be able to exploit the new digital era — which it says will be defined by digital video and mobile devices.
“I believe mobility will be one of the key trends,” says Adobe President and Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Narayen. “In China and India, you’ll have a whole generation of people who will access the Internet without ever owning a PC.”
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