Macwelt’s editors Martin Stein and Walter Mehl, met Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen during his presentation of Adobe’s Network Publishing concept in Munich, Germany. Chizen explained his vision of the publishing market and why Network Publishing is so essential for Adobe’s product strategy. However, he also talked of PDF, Mac OS X, Macromedia, and “Premiere Elements.”
In the Macwelt story, Chizen said that PDF is “the most important standard for Adobe” and that the company will continue to make sure that PDF works well in the XML world. PDF is embedded in Mac OS X. If Adobe moves ahead with new versions of PDF, how will these be implemented in the operating system?
“It’s a good question for Apple,” Chizen told Macwelt. “We continue to work closely with them to give them some indication of what we are doing, because we want to try to have compatibility, but you can probably expect that the PDF created from an Adobe application like Acrobat is always going to be richer than Apple’s implementation of PDF. If you think of the PDF that Apple creates has more of the PDF basic while the PDF created by Acrobat will be much more sophisticated, much more a container for rich and reliable information.”
Chizen also said that Adobe and Macromedia, despite the popular perception, don’t actually compete in many areas. They do compete with Golive and Dreamweaver, with Live Motion and Flash authoring, and a “little bit with Illustrator and Freehand, but I think we won the last one and most people are switching to Illustrator.” And he said that Macromedia has taken the approach of trying to deliver a lot of the Web development tools themselves.
“So with the personalization with Andromedia, and with the acquisition of Allaire, they are trying to do a lot oft enterprise solutions themselves,” Chizen told Macwelt. “Our strategy is to work more closely with partners, because we think that partners like Interwoven and companies like IBM Websphere and BEA Systems will be more successful than Adobe could be in that space.”
Chizen also told Macwelt that there would probably be more products like Photoshop Elements, which is a simplified version of the high-end graphics program targeted to users who aren’t graphics professionals. Along those lines, the CEO said that “Premiere Elements” is a possibility.
“Especially as DVD becomes easier to come in and things like DVD-authoring,” Chizen told Macwelt. “So Apple has iMovie, but maybe there is a step above iMovie before Premiere.”