Yeah, you read right. I'm stepping down from my post as CEO of Adobe effective December 1.
Shantanu will be taking over at that point. I'll be on the Board and serve as an adviser 'till the end of Fiscal Year 2008... so I'll be gone around the beginning of 2009.
I made a personal decision to step down, so do me and my family a favor and don't hunt us down just to ask me why I'm leaving.. I think the stock options transaction from a few days ago should have tipped more people off, but it obviously didn't.
I guess this ends my diary. Ahhhhhh dear. So much fun writing stuff that no one has read. No word on whether Shantanu will start his own. Knowing that he's gonna be like everything at once, I doubt it.
Well, I guess this is goodbye. Goodbye, Adobe.
-Bruce
Monday, November 12, 2007
Friday, November 9, 2007
iPhone out in England and Germany; Still no Flash
I've tried to keep calm about the whole no-Flash-on-iPhone-but-Apple-says-iPhone-uses-real-Internet thing. You know that.
It's beginning to get a tad ridiculous. iPhone in England and Germany as of a few hours ago, France in a few weeks, apparently Canada by Hannukah (yes, I'm Jewish)... yet still no Flash!
How do you suggest you offer the real Internet, Apple, without Flash? In case you, I don't know, forgot, Flash is on like 99.3% of computers (that's really everyone but Microsoft fanboys and people still using DOS, remember).
And if I'm not mistaken, as of a few hours, our estimates say that Flash Player 9 has been installed over 3 billion times!
I mean, I think our engineers can get Flash to work well (to some very limited extent) on Windows Mobile (emphasis on very limited), and now they can't wait to get Flash working and work on getting it officially packaged with Google's Android!
Well, anyway, have a good weekend.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Photoshop Express Beta by Year's End
Great news, folks.
We'll have a beta of Photoshop Express, our much-anticipated online version of Photoshop, out by the end of this year. So, that means within the next month and a half or so. Not far away!
It'll probably be a private beta, or somewhat limited in the partners we give access to. Initially.
We'll be launching the gold version sometime next year. If you haven't heard of Photoshop Express, it's our 'express' version of Photoshop that'll be available online for free, built only using Flash/Flex. And by express, I mean it's not really the Photoshop we all know and love. It only will have some of the more basic, yet useful features. At least when we first launch it.
This is a true test for Adobe, because I said a few weeks ago that Adobe will be transitioning its products to the web in the next 10 years. Or something like that, anyway. This has been, and will be, a great experience and a great learning time for our developers. We appreciate your patience.
We'll have a beta of Photoshop Express, our much-anticipated online version of Photoshop, out by the end of this year. So, that means within the next month and a half or so. Not far away!
It'll probably be a private beta, or somewhat limited in the partners we give access to. Initially.
We'll be launching the gold version sometime next year. If you haven't heard of Photoshop Express, it's our 'express' version of Photoshop that'll be available online for free, built only using Flash/Flex. And by express, I mean it's not really the Photoshop we all know and love. It only will have some of the more basic, yet useful features. At least when we first launch it.
This is a true test for Adobe, because I said a few weeks ago that Adobe will be transitioning its products to the web in the next 10 years. Or something like that, anyway. This has been, and will be, a great experience and a great learning time for our developers. We appreciate your patience.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Students: Start Making a Difference
...in RIAs. No, seriously. We launched our Education Developer Center today. This is where all you budding underage Flex and AIR developers can get your free copy of Flex Builder 2 (and the latest beta of Flex Builder 3).
Maybe some of the text in on the site isn't written in the best terms for our visitor demographics, but if that's a real issue, we'll fix it as necessary. And maybe it shouldn't link to the regular Developer Center's collaborative advanced cookbook, getting started guides and wiki...
Well, it's a step in the right direction, anyway.
It's also got a really nice motivational letter to educators by Yakov Fain on why Flex should be taught in the classrooms, alongside Java or C++, or on its own.
Check it out, and if you're a student, go ahead and download Flex! For free. Yes, it's legal.
Maybe some of the text in on the site isn't written in the best terms for our visitor demographics, but if that's a real issue, we'll fix it as necessary. And maybe it shouldn't link to the regular Developer Center's collaborative advanced cookbook, getting started guides and wiki...
Well, it's a step in the right direction, anyway.
It's also got a really nice motivational letter to educators by Yakov Fain on why Flex should be taught in the classrooms, alongside Java or C++, or on its own.
Check it out, and if you're a student, go ahead and download Flex! For free. Yes, it's legal.
Hey, look, we know Photoshop isn't perfect.
Of course, I could tell you this all day, and because I'm the CEO (who just exercised some stock options yesterday and ended up with ~$8 million)... but I think we should let John Nack, who's our Senior Photoshop Product Manager, tell us what's not as good as it should or could be.
He makes some pretty good points, and I know he's dying to incorporate these kinds of ideas into the next version of Photoshop (CS4). Unfortunately, that's still a long ways off.
But, here's the deal. Photoshop is basically our cornerstone desktop product, and has been for a really long time. It's used for so many different purposes that it's terribly difficult to expect the Photoshop guys to incorporate all of the features without overbloating the entire application (and if you ask almost anyone, they'll tell you the Team hasn't done too well at decreasing the bloat) with features that person won't use.
Does this mean we make it easier to add or remove features? Does it mean we spin off Photoshop into more Photoshop Family products than Photoshop and Photoshop Extended? We want to know from you what, well, you want. Comment on John's blog post with what you think.
If you use Photoshop or are at all interested, it's a really interseting read.
He makes some pretty good points, and I know he's dying to incorporate these kinds of ideas into the next version of Photoshop (CS4). Unfortunately, that's still a long ways off.
But, here's the deal. Photoshop is basically our cornerstone desktop product, and has been for a really long time. It's used for so many different purposes that it's terribly difficult to expect the Photoshop guys to incorporate all of the features without overbloating the entire application (and if you ask almost anyone, they'll tell you the Team hasn't done too well at decreasing the bloat) with features that person won't use.
Does this mean we make it easier to add or remove features? Does it mean we spin off Photoshop into more Photoshop Family products than Photoshop and Photoshop Extended? We want to know from you what, well, you want. Comment on John's blog post with what you think.
If you use Photoshop or are at all interested, it's a really interseting read.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Mozilla's Prism
I'm not sure if you've heard or read about Mozilla's 'Prism,' which a lot of people are comparing to AIR.
I'm here to tell you two things about it: it's not anything interesting--from what I can gather, it's merely a browser without an address bar that goes to a specific place (like Gmail or Adobe.com). Is this so revolutionary? I really don't think so.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.
And also, they released Prism for Mac and Linux a bit earlier today. Again, there was much fanfare, but it's not really exciting nor does it do anything revolutionary for those operating systems. Firefox has been available for OS X and Linux for years now...
So, in conclusion, Prism is...
Firefox minus the address bar that now works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Don't worry, eager Linux users -- AIR for Linux is in the works and we're trying to get it out ASAP.
Oh, and while I can't confirm this, we're hoping we can have Flash running on Google's Android mobile operating system. I'll tell you if I have any more news concerning this great operating system (in case you can't tell, I love the idea of Android).
I'm here to tell you two things about it: it's not anything interesting--from what I can gather, it's merely a browser without an address bar that goes to a specific place (like Gmail or Adobe.com). Is this so revolutionary? I really don't think so.
Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong on this.
And also, they released Prism for Mac and Linux a bit earlier today. Again, there was much fanfare, but it's not really exciting nor does it do anything revolutionary for those operating systems. Firefox has been available for OS X and Linux for years now...
So, in conclusion, Prism is...
Firefox minus the address bar that now works on Windows, Mac and Linux. Don't worry, eager Linux users -- AIR for Linux is in the works and we're trying to get it out ASAP.
Oh, and while I can't confirm this, we're hoping we can have Flash running on Google's Android mobile operating system. I'll tell you if I have any more news concerning this great operating system (in case you can't tell, I love the idea of Android).
Friday, November 2, 2007
Sorry, Brandon; Apple's not buying Adobe
Brandon Watts of OSWeekly.com has posted an editorial piece on why it would make sense for Apple to acquire Adobe. My response: not happening.
See, you make good points for why Apple would buy Adobe, but couldn't you make similar points for Microsoft or even Google?
And there's another problem with your argument for Apple (or Microsoft) buying us. Adobe is committed to offering equal products across platforms. It's very important that the products we ship for Windows are just as good on OS X or even Linux and vice-versa. Sure sure, we'd still obviously release products for Windows and Linux... but don't you think the (indirect) pressure would be on for the products for those two platforms to not be of the same quality of those for the Mac? How about those anti-trust issues in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems division sharing development information with the software division in the '80s? Apple spun off their applications business into Claris (now FileMaker), and there was a lot of pressure on Microsoft to do a similar thing -- something they obviously didn't do.
Wouldn't an Apple acquisition of Adobe just refuel the fire for these issues?
Interestingly, an acquisition by Google avoids all of these cross platform related issues. Hmm. But don't worry -- we're not being acquired by Microsoft or Apple. Okay, Brandon?
See, you make good points for why Apple would buy Adobe, but couldn't you make similar points for Microsoft or even Google?
And there's another problem with your argument for Apple (or Microsoft) buying us. Adobe is committed to offering equal products across platforms. It's very important that the products we ship for Windows are just as good on OS X or even Linux and vice-versa. Sure sure, we'd still obviously release products for Windows and Linux... but don't you think the (indirect) pressure would be on for the products for those two platforms to not be of the same quality of those for the Mac? How about those anti-trust issues in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems division sharing development information with the software division in the '80s? Apple spun off their applications business into Claris (now FileMaker), and there was a lot of pressure on Microsoft to do a similar thing -- something they obviously didn't do.
Wouldn't an Apple acquisition of Adobe just refuel the fire for these issues?
Interestingly, an acquisition by Google avoids all of these cross platform related issues. Hmm. But don't worry -- we're not being acquired by Microsoft or Apple. Okay, Brandon?
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