This hebdomad , Adobeannounced the surrender of chief executive officer Bruce Chizen , with company President and Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Narayen film over Chizen ’s role , effective December 1 . This word get shortly after the 25th day of remembrance of the company ’s founding , and a few months after release of the full - scale practical app avalanche known as Creative Suite 3 .

Having get laid Bruce for nearly two 10 , I ’m sure that he felt that this was the correct time to make his exit : Adobe is financially firm and has a abstruse portfolio of products that yoke mark , WWW , picture and professional and consumer tomography mart . What happened in the seven years since hetook the reinsfrom Adobe carbon monoxide gas - founding father John Warnock ?

The Macromedia acquisition

And , to anyone who contend that Adobe screwed up Macromedia , would you have preferred that Microsoft been the buyer ? I suppose not . Adobe was the good caretaker for the confused , eight - legged caller that Macromedia had become , and it was smart enough to eff that Flash and Dreamweaver were better than anything it had in - house .

InDesign

Let ’s talk about veridical competition for a hour .

Long ago , a single computer software product , Aldus PageMaker , changed the fashion many of us published magazines , ledger and print textile . Adobe in the end bought Aldus ( and sent the Illustrator competitor , Freehand , to Macromedia , by the way — didn’t that turn out well ? ) , but by the clock time that happened , a piffling company from Denver call Quark had taken over the mark - print world . Adobe spent 1000000 of dollar mark test to rejigger PageMaker into a competitor , but failed miserably . This despite the fact that , in all the years I ’ve been cover the food market , I have never — never — get a line so many regular complaints about a society with a mainstream product as I did about Quark . aboveboard , in this humankind , not even Microsoft comes close in terms of drug user dissatisfaction . People want Adobe to come through ; hell , they begged Adobe to save them every time they shipped a check off to Colorado .

Under Chizen ’s lookout man , Adobe go back to the basics , scrapped PageMaker , and built a 21st - century publication ware called InDesign . The first version was well - nearly unusable in a output environment . The second version was marginally better . Finally , with the Creative Suite 2 release , InDesign was what Version 1.0 wanted to be : a robust , industrial - strength contender to QuarkXPress . And suppose what ? In the outgrowth , InDesign work its room into Quark shops , and somehow Quark became more customer - focussed . That ’s competition as it should be . Unfortunately , it seldom works like that , so enjoy it while we have it .

Creative Suite

If you ’re into products , Christmas come ahead of time this year , when Adobe embark Creative Suite 3 , releasing update to nearly a million products . That ’s certainly what it seemed like , at least , with the complex matrix of collections and editions and sidegrades and staged releases that accompanied the CS3 bandwagon .

While I think Adobe could certainly have done a better selling job with CS3 , it has been relentless in providing regular update to its core suite of products . We can — and do — moan about upgrade pricing , but when you look at the key products in the retinue — Photoshop , InDesign , Illustrator , Dreamweaver — it ’s hard to debate against their specialty .

I know that there areplenty of peoplewho recollect that the suite isbloatware , but , having used Photoshop , Illustrator and InDesign regularly for the past six months , those apps feel much more correct for the things I do than some of the Office applications programme . Besides , let ’s get real : if you need alternatives to something like Photoshop , they ’re certainly coming fast and fierce these days .

We champion Apple for releasing veritable adaptation of OS X , but somehow Adobe ’s expiration of three originative Suite versions in four years is view as money - grubbing . Sorry , that ’s capitalist economy at work , and you do n’t have to play ; that ’s why there are plenty of citizenry who work fruitfully on Power Mac G4s and Mac OS X 10.2 , to say nothing of the folks who have stuck with Power Mac G3s and OS 9.2.2 .

And , ummm … video

Over the past few years , Mac users have had more than a few complaints about Adobe ’s perceived indifference for the platform — including the lack of OS cristal versions of Photoshop and Illustrator back in 2001 — and crest perhaps by the Sopranos - style icing of Adobe Premiere for the Mac in 2003 . blank out for a minute that Apple owned the high- , in-between , and low - close of the Mac TV space , and that it was actively and aggressively competing against Adobe . Premiere was n’t really a great product to start with , on Mac or Windows , which is why Apple was able to seize the higher ground . Why should we be offended because there was one less bad product available for the Mac ?

No , the real reason was that the end of Premiere somehow represented the graduation exercise of the atrocious , protracted passing of Adobe from the Mac platform . However , away from the afflictive , prolong platform misalignment of Photoshop Elements — business leader of the hill and a edition ahead on Windows , a lackluster challenger of kind to iPhoto on the Mac — there ’s really little for us to be distressed about when talk about Adobe ’s farseeing - condition Mac consignment .

Of course , Adobe has since gruntle us by bringing Premiere Pro back to the Mac as part of CS3 , but I ’m start to tell you that I do n’t think Adobe should be fiddle with picture ( or sound , for that matter ) . I think this is the one place where the size of the party seems to prescribe that it have a TV offer , but it really feels like an afterthought to me . possibly this is competition at work — witness the uproar over iMovie ’ 08 — and I ’m okay with it . Just do n’t expect me to like it .

give that Adobe ’s revenues will have nearly tripled over the retiring seven years , and that it essay its love life to the Mac community by at least releasing the same stuff — whether you opine that stuff is pure or not — for our side of the world as it has on Windows , I ’d say that Chizen did a damn good job for his investor and for us . It ’s Narayen ’s turn at bat , and he ’s got some intimidating tasks ahead of him — not only must he keep the financial firm in order , but he must move decisively toward Adobe ’s publicly put forward goal of turning its core applications intoonline - based tools .

But first , Shantanu , do us all a favour : go under FrameMaker free . Please . Make it open reservoir or something , but permit someone else deal with it . I ’m certain that it would for certain rationalize down onthe e - ring mail , and lease you get on with the more important stuff .