Adobe said: Google is the only competitor _it industry

Adobe has a clear lead in the so-called authoring software market, including image editing, Web page design, and typesetting tools. People no longer think that the software packages developed by big companies are the best, and more and more free software is appearing on the market.

Chizen, Adobe's chief executive, said Adobe would surely lose some of its markets. Adobe will release the Creative Suite package later this month.

But Bruce believes that by providing free web-based tools, Google and other competitors will eat into Adobe's key market, which is why Adobe releases its free web version of Photoshop in the next few months.

In an interview with CNET News.com, Bruce talked about new and old rivals, some of the secrets of the acquisition of Macromedia, and why the video will be a new and important technology for Adobe.

Q: When asked why Adobe bought Macromedia last year, your answer was only one word: Flash.

A: By acquiring Macromedia, we have gained a lot. We have acquired innovative ability, positive and enterprising talent, got an excellent video platform, after completing the acquisition, I really understand the power of Flash video. The Flash Media server is a big surprise. We have entered the core area of the Web.

By acquiring Macromedia, we gained flex and ColdFusion as a way to add value to the business process, and strode into the mobile phone field. We learned that people will access information more on non-PC devices, but Adobe Reader is not the best solution. Flash Lite has also been successful, equipment manufacturers are racing to preinstall Flash Lite. Flash Lite are pre-installed on each PS3.

Q: Will Dreamweaver be an integral part of the creative suite?

A: Yes, the next version of the creative suite will be so. By double-clicking a picture in Dreamweaver, the user can start Photoshop, and when you modify the picture in Photoshop, the picture in Dreamweaver is automatically modified.

Q: Are you and Microsoft competitors in the field of electronic documentation? Are your products competing with Office 2007?

A: Yes, we are competing with Microsoft, but we have little impact on it. Most of our users are in areas such as financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, government, and so on, they must publish documents outside the firewall and require the reliability of Adobe Reader, which Microsoft lacks.

Customers can't get reliability or think everyone is running XP, XP SP2, Vista operating systems. Our customers want users to have access to their documents and business processes regardless of the operating system and browsers they are running, and they need users to do these tasks in a reliable way. This is our unique advantage.

Ameriprise or fidelity used the Adobe Flex and live Cycle,yahoo maps to use the Flex/flash,google finance is based on Flash.

Our technology is unique. The only company that can imitate us is Google, because it has a lot of talent and abundant financial resources.

Q: You mentioned that Google is the only company that can imitate you, can you explain it further?

A: Without using our tools, Google will be able to develop attractive sites because it has the resources to have enough people to write code manually, something that no other vendor can match.

Q: Microsoft can't do this?

A: If you look at Microsoft's Web site, it uses a lot of Flash and PDF. Microsoft doesn't even use its own technology, which makes me think that, despite the great tools that can be developed, Microsoft may not be able to use its own tools as well as companies like Google.

Q: In terms of hosting software, how is Google competing with you?

A: If we do not provide some hosting software, it will do so. We would be ashamed if we were not ahead of Google. Users want us to provide these managed software. If users want solutions published through the Web, through a business model that they do not need to pay, we have to do this, or we will lose these customers.

Q: Did Google become your competitor last year?

A: Yes, when it comes to acquiring Picasa, it becomes our competitor. Later, it acquired Writely and released Google Apps. I think, by releasing remix video products, we send a powerful signal: we're not sitting ducks.

Q: Is it true that the vast majority of creative suite users are not professionals?

A: That's true. I call them non-creative professionals who don't work in web development, design, newspaper jobs, and probably just the salespeople who want to design better PowerPoint slide shows. 40% of Creative Suite users are not creative professionals, but they are more interested in our brand and product quality.

Q: Are you worried about the pressure from open source software?

A: no worries. Although open source has received a lot of attention, at least in our business areas, open source software is still lagging behind us in terms of product quality and innovation. If the new version of Photoshop has a cool feature that is not available in open source software, people want to use Photoshop, which I think is the difference between our customers and word processing and spreadsheet software customers. We're working with the open source community, and we're going to be more cooperative.

Q: You said at the Web 2.0 summit that we are willing to share, but we have to stop, is that so?

A: We spend 19% of our sales revenue on research and development, my business must make money, I have to consider the interests of shareholders.

Q: What do you think of the way Adobe is compared to IBM and other companies in terms of open source code?

A: The reason IBM is passionate about open source is that its main business is infrastructure, not apps, so it doesn't care about making apps free. If someone lets IBM make its basic software, including content management systems, open source software, IBM will not do it, because it relies on these software to make money.

As long as you want to rely on which software to make money, the enterprise will not make it open source software. No one can guarantee that the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is completely open source code and can make money forever. Red Hat is a service business. We rely on the software rather than the service business.

Q: What about your enterprise software business through the introduction of live cycle and ColdFusion?

A: In the past year, our enterprise software business revenue is 200 million U.S. dollars, unfortunately, for us, such a business income of 3 billion U.S. dollars for the company, this is a poor figure, accounting for only 8% of our business income. The situation will make a big difference after the launch of live Cycle 8 later this spring.

Q: What is the important new market for Adobe in the future?

Answer: Video. I mean the video is not just editing, but the whole workflow, including real-time editing, post-production, streaming, DRM, publishing, and so on.

The second focus is to ensure that our technology is accessible to non-PC devices. We expect that by the end of this year, a large mobile phone operator in the United States will deploy a service based on Flash cast. Business will remain a major focus for us. In addition, real-time collaboration, digital books, hosting applications will also be our focus on the field.