For Position Only: Publishing’s New Starship Enterprise
It’s subtle, so if you haven’t been looking for it you might not have noticed. But the word keeps popping up: on the company’s Web site, in its press and marketing materials, and this week, the word was all over the company’s intra-quarter update to Wall Street analysts.
The company is Adobe.
The word is “enterprise.”
Does it raise the hair on the back of your neck? It does mine. I certainly can’t tell you what’s going on down there in San Jose in CEO Bruce Chizen’s office, but having watched Adobe for more than 10 years now and having seen what goes on with technology companies over time, I have a few ideas, none of which bode well for professional graphic artists and print publishers.
From Garage to Grandiose
Nowhere is Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest more applicable than among technology vendors. Simply being profitable isn’t enough, especially among publicly held corporations. They have to grow. It’s grow or die — kind of like the academic world’s publish-or-perish mantra, where professors have to publish books and articles or their careers wither. In business, shareholders aren’t satisfied unless revenues grow and profits are plenty, and that’s what companies strive for. It makes everybody happy: management, employees, stockholders, and, theoretically, even customers.
Now consider Adobe. The company is 20 years old this year — ancient by technology standards. It started with two men — Chuck Geschke and John Warnock — and an untested but exciting technology called PostScript. Two decades later, Adobe is a billion-dollar software company with a few thousand employees, shipping literally dozens of products to customers around the world in many language versions.
The company got this far thanks to two things: First, it sold well-developed products that are good at what they do and that have transformed an entire industry in the process. Just look at Photoshop. But the second thing that helped the company thrive is that it acquired great technology that it couldn’t develop on its own — PageMaker, FrameMaker, and GoLive, for example, all were purchased from other technology vendors. Back to survival of the fittest: That’s one of the things that happens to technology companies that make a good product but come up against a mightier competitor — they get eaten alive. No company is immune. Just look at Compaq.
Opportunity Knocks
That’s why even though Adobe is a healthy company in good standing, it has to keep finding new opportunities and areas for growth. The problem is, the graphic arts market is saturated. Everyone owns Photoshop, almost everyone owns Illustrator, within a few years, everyone will probably also own InDesign. There’s little room for growth, and on top of that, at a certain point — especially when times are tight as they have been of late — you can’t count on customers to upgrade every application with every new version anymore.
Think about it: Illustrator 10? The version numbers climb higher and higher, and people start asking themselves, “What does the new version have that I really need in order to be more productive at my job? ” Whiz-bang new filters and patterns may not be reason enough to open my pocketbook. If I can do my work just fine, thanks, with Illustrator 9, why pay for 10? Why not wait and see what 11 has to offer? Why not skip this version and hold off until I upgrade my system’s RAM and CPU power, or my OS, later this year, maybe next?
When customers start thinking that way, then Adobe needs some new customers. And apparently it has set it sights on the enterprise — an untapped market for this graphics-oriented company. That’s clearly the reason it just acquired Accelio, an Ottawa-based corporation whose products bring PDF-based e-forms and “e-presentment” functionality and services to Fortune 500-type — a.k.a. enterprise — companies. (Don’t get me started on how stupid the term ” e-presentment” is. What it means is a company’s efficient deployment of custom, personalized electronic forms and documents to its customers.)
E-forms, on the one hand, are a far cry from Adobe’s roots in technologies like Photoshop and so many of the other products it has developed to serve the graphic arts market. On the other hand, they’re also a logical extension of the company’s Acrobat technology, which itself derives from PostScript. So it does make sense — especially financially, apparently. Adobe estimates the e-forms market to grow to $3 billion by 2004. That’s opportunity knocking, and I can’t blame Adobe for opening the door. E-forms aren’t glamorous like Photoshop, maybe not revolutionary like PageMaker, but I have to admit, PDF has some pretty cool interactive forms capabilities already, and Accelio’s technology greatly enhances their power for, um, enterprise businesses.
Up Close and Impersonal
I just wonder where this leaves customers like you and me, graphic artists and publishing and production professionals. We’ve been Adobe’s bread and butter all its life, we’ve made this company what it is. And when I see that they’re going after the enterprise, my imagination runs wild with images of IBM and Oracle, which from my outside (and probably naïve) perspective seem like huge, impersonal companies serving a huge, impersonal market. I worry that Adobe will forget about us, customers who are passionate about their jobs and who’ve been on a wild, revolutionary ride with Adobe for the past 20 years. Will Adobe lose its soul going after the enterprise?
Don’t get my musings wrong — I know there are plenty of ways in which Adobe is already a corporate behemoth. So I cling to the fact that Adobe has always been very attentive to customers’ needs and has always offered very responsive customer service (at least, compared to some other technology vendors we’ve all dealt with). This, too, has been an important element in the company’s success to date. And if anyone at Adobe is reading this now, hear my request on behalf of your loyal user base: Don’t forget about us, your family, now that you’re all grown up and you’re leaving home.
This article was last modified on March 13, 2022
This article was first published on May 2, 2002
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