I stepped down.

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

Good morning.

I'm Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe Systems, Inc., creator of standards in the world.

PDF? Ours. Flash? Ours. Photoshop? Ours. Dreamweaver? Ours. The term 'rich Internet application' or RIA? We created it.

And I haven't even gotten started.

At Adobe, we're building up our warchest to take on Microsoft because, honestly, we hate them. They tried to squash us like 20 years ago. Our stock collapsed. Then the whole anti-trust stuff started. We bounced back up. They failed. We want revenge. Silverlight? I've made it clear that we at Adobe think Silverlight is just an imitator of what Flash used to be.

And it's obvious that Microsoft doesn't even like Silverlight. You know, the website for Halo 3 runs Flash? Didn't they make a big deal about how it runs Silverlight? Well, there is a Halo 3 website running on Silverlight. It's so hidden, I could barely find it! You have to go to the Silverlight.net Showcase, find the little Halo 3 icon towards the bottom, click on it, and then click on the View Now button. (by the way, the box that pops up and blurs the screen behind it? totally a copy of our Flex/Flash alert box)

Now, I must get back to Buzzword. Shantanu and I are collaboratively working with some of our engineers on our OS X Leopard FAQ. Apparently some people are upset because our products don't work on Leopard. It's not our fault that Apple doesn't like us because we compete with Final Cut with Premiere!