The Financial Express
Adobe seems to be banking on creativity to sail out of recession and stand out from the crowd. Revenue targets might prove to be a struggle, but the company is working hard to identify new growth markets. And India offers a land of opportunities, according to Abode Asia Pacific head of Creative Professions platform, Michael Stoddart. In an interaction, Stoddart narrates the company’s long-term strategies and gives an insight into the Web market, which is moving deeper into mobile phones.
Excerpts:
How have Web 2.0 and blogs affected product profile of Adobe?
The rise of blogs, Web 2.0 and services like Twitter gets us the immediate feedback of the customers. It is another medium for our clients to communicate with their customers.
Content for Facebook is created by using our tools. We have a website called labs.adobe.com where our customers can go and download the software we have been working on and which has not been released. We are a much more open company due to the effect of social media.
How do you plan to tackle the problem of piracy?
We have always had a long-term approach to piracy. We have an entire team which has been working with local bodies to carry out enforcement actions. In India, during the last six months, we have done about 25 enforcement actions on various companies across segments. Though our objective is to educate people and encourage them to buy legal software, we adopt a strict approach against anyone who indulges in piracy of our products.
In 2005, you acquired a company called Macromedia. How far has the integration of Adobe’s products been successful with that of the company?
Many people in the beginning thought that the two companies coming together will not work. A lot of large mergers tend to fail. The two companies worked very hard at it. Adobe is a much better company as a result of that. For example, the Flash technology that is the Macromedia technology is now in all of our products. We put Flash into our products and our products went out to Flash and others. Macromedia opened up Adobe. It also helped us to become an open-minded and a forward-thinking company and we have become a major player in leading Web 2.0 technology. So it has been very successful both at the strategic and technological level.
How do you rate Adobe’s position when Microsoft is entering your turf?
They have realised what we have always said that experience is most important. You may have the best website backend on the planet, but if the website is not engaging and interesting to look at, the customers will move away.
Our customers will never think to put video on the website as they have now seen how easy it is to do. It has moved beyond YouTube, which has always used our technology. Every website does not only have HTML. It has a Flash interface, which is really attractive and interesting to look at. So Microsoft, which has a great developer community, saw that.
But I don’t think they understand the designing aspect. What matters to a designer is very different from what matters to a developer. As far as the idea of bringing the designers and developers together is concerned, I think Adobe is going to be much better than Microsoft, because we feel we have a long-term relationship with designers.
We understand what drives the designer and what they want to express. The designers always want to make a website look cool. They want one of their friends to have a look at it. That I think is much more critical than a lot at the backend. Another reason, we will be more successful than Microsoft is that we go from print to Web. Microsoft doesn’t do print. But our designers do both print and Web. We are the only one who have end-to-end and top-to-bottom workflow. That is print to Web and designer to developer. So I think in the long term, we will be successful. We are very different from Microsoft. We conquer the Microsoft effect by working hard. This is our space and Microsoft plays in lot of other spaces.
Among Web, print and mobile media, which segment do you expect to contribute most to the company’s growth in the future?
Print generates a lot of revenue, but growth is not very much there. The Web and mobile media will probably come together. You will view content on your mobile, which you have on your computer. Internet on mobile is where the growth is. Nowadays, a lot of people get information on their cellphone, which they used to get from computer
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