Lately rumors have it that Steve Jobs has been increasingly vocal about criticizing Adobe to potential partners. In the rumors he claims that Flash is a resource hog and is outdated technology. He’s also reportedly said that Adobe was lazy.
Now, I have no idea if he actually said these things, but I think he did. Why? Because they’re true.
First off, Adobe is more lazy than I would imagine a large software company could be. Look at recent (or even not so recent) releases of Photoshop. They barely have any new features. For a company that could be said to be the leader in photo editing, they are’t a leader at all. Photoshop feels like an application from ten years ago.
Whenever you hear about a new feature for Photoshop, the feature is generally what I would call “quaint”. Their features are largely useless but something that might make a demo interesting, usually only for the moment of the demo, and not quite successfully. They have no ability to make changes that actually make every day photo editing and graphic creation easier. Believe me, Photoshop has a long way to go on that.
What you can gather from the Photoshop situation is that the company has no technical leaders anymore. They’re either gone, or they’re rich enough that they’ve become lazy.
I got into an argument with John Nack on his blog a while back about why they didn’t move to Cocoa on the Mac sooner. It was obvious many years before that Cocoa was the thing to use, but Adobe didn’t move. John was full of excuses, but excuses didn’t get things done, did they. In business, it’s results that matter, not excuses. Now Adobe is responding to Steve Jobs’ rumored comments with excuses. Corporate excuses look a bit different, “We are excited to receive feedback and listen to our customers!”
Whatever.
With regard to Flash, yes it’s outdated technology. Nobody wants to use a “platform” that isn’t open anymore because then you’re completely reliant on the company that makes it to improve it. The reason HTML5 is great is that the many different players each keep setting the performance and conformance bars higher, so they all either get better or die.
Adobe probably knows this, but they don’t want to admit it because they also know they aren’t very good at developing software anymore and don’t want to set themselves up to have to compete.
Lastly, Adobe’s CEO, Shantanu Narayen, is the worst choice they could have made. He’s just a bad fit for the company. The people that buy Adobe software don’t want to watch a bad speaker and boring executive talk. As Steve Jobs, and on the other hand, Steve Ballmer have shown, you don’t get to be an uncharismatic CEO anymore. As a CEO, you are the lead salesman to the consumer, and if they don’t like you, they’ll be looking for opportunities to replace your products.