Streams of Thought: Altering Course—The Adobe Warship Begins to Turn
冒着听起来像个奥多比骗子的风险, something interesting is happening at The Company Formerly Known as Photoshop.
在过去的15年里, I’ve done market and strategic analysis for quite a few companies in the digital media space, and I’ve covered many more as part of my article-writing addiction. Strategy work isn’t for those who want instant gratification: Normally, 几个月后才能看到结果, 即使是在小公司. For a large company, strategic shifts can take many, many years.
So when a company shows signs of shifting course, I often plot a "what if?" path and look to the horizon to see if the course will hold bearing. And seldom have I seen a large company making as nimble a turn as Adobe has in the last 7 months as it has moved into uncharted waters of offering continent-sized services.
While the latest turn may appear to be a spur-of-the moment tack, it’s actually the result of a strategic change in course. 就像大船一样, major corporate shifts in course require significant planning—and often also require a captain with renewed vision at the wheel. Adobe首席执行官Bruce Chizen于2000年担任该职位, 像许多公司飞行员一样, had to weather the joint hurricanes of 9/11 and the dot-com bubble, both of which wreaked devastation on the global enterprise business market Adobe was then chasing.
"A lot of companies got caught in the dot-com bubble," said Chizen in a 2004 interview. "By the time it burst, we had already refocused our business . . . We decided to concentrate on creative professionals and people who really cared about the quality of the 信息 they communicated. We also decided to focus on document workflows and to streamline the company."
当一个船长上船并绘制了一条新航线, 命令转换为行动, moving from the wheel to the rudder in various maneuvers. 外在看不到的东西, 至少要等到船开始转弯, is the effort required to move the rudder in the first place. Often there’s little external evidence until all the machinery begins to move in unison, and then only a few ripples may appear until the rudder really begins to swing and the wake begins, 在事后看来, 生产.
Adobe’s document workflow strategy in 2004–2005 centered on Acrobat, which led several observers—myself included—to criticize Chizen’s decisions to lessen the role of video and limit Premiere to the corporate video market. 从今天的有利位置来看, 这一举动是, 在最坏的情况下, a slight tack too far that has long since been corrected.
I noticed a few ripples around the rudder when Adobe began adding large and small vessels to its fleet, 最著名的是Macromedia和Serious Magic. But any number of watercraft will rock in the wake of the company’s move toward services—some of which could bring it into direct competition with those very "creative professionals" that Chizen mentioned in the earlier interview.
As the second largest software company in the world—behind Microsoft—Adobe could have easily chosen to maintain its initial course centered on Creative Suite 3. Yet the company has plotted a trajectory further across the map into a territory once labeled "Here There Be Dragons" on most software company maps. Adobe has altered its course in search of a new hybrid services-products model or a technology platform that seamlessly integrates local and far-flung resources.
During pre-CS3-release training at Adobe back in May and then again at Adobe MAX 2007 in October, Adobe provided a few channel markers on the new course it hopes its partners and customers will follow.
除了Adobe Media Player (AMP)之外, which is to be released in early 2008 and which still poses unanswered questions about privacy and viewing aggregation that could torpedo the project (just think of AMP as RealPlayer redux and several issues come to mine, er, 介意), 该公司专注于为网络带来工具. Premiere and Photoshop have, or will soon have, limited online versions. And Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) allows Flash ActionScript and Flex files to run on cross-platform desktops as easily as they run on the web.
Flash has been integrated into Acrobat to streamline the review process. H.为像BBC这样的客户增加了264和AAC, who will use the codecs to stream via Adobe’s in-house CDN or a partner CDN . . . 这样的例子不胜枚举.
和. 无论你往哪里看, Adobe shows signs of turning into a relatively successful hybrid company that uses the web and the desktop as equal platforms. 前面有波浪吗? 当然. 但是路线已经改变了, 手露出来, so keep an eye out as Adobe lofts into uncharted waters.
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