Used to be such a popular company…
Remember the good old days in the print publishing industry when Quark was the enemy?
When everyone had Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator and wished that Adobe could bring out an alternative to Pagemaker that would rival Quark?
Well Adobe did that with InDesign, although the first releases were flawed and unfortunately timed promotions on subsequent releases coincided with the dot com crash, meaning that the print customers were neglected in favour of the more lucrative and exciting video editing and web market once the share prices plummetted.
But the web products were a waste of time – we all knew that Macromedia was the leader in that field. As, it appears, Adobe finally admitted when it got out the cheque book.
And so with web (albeit someone else's products) and video effects firmly established the focus returned to the print customers. "Hooray!" we cried, believing that once again Adobe cared about the customers who supported it from the outset and made it great.
And just as the print industry was beginning to feel loved by the company that it has always admired for its contribution to the industry, Adobe whips out a knife, stabs it in the back and decides to mould its products for the home user and corporate markets.
Come back John Warnock – we miss you.