If you're a Web designer, you know you can't live without Adobe (ADBE) Photoshop. Granted, there are some fine, popular open-source (ImageMagick, the Gimp) and commercial (DeBabelizer, Fireworks) solutions for building and manipulating Web graphics. But Photoshop is so huge, so powerful and so entrenched that you can't avoid it for long. Indeed, Photoshop is so all-inclusive that successful companies have been built around products that add only a few capabilities to the mother product.
Yet like so many of Adobe's programs used for online design, Photoshop isn't a piece of software designed for the Web. Beloved by designers long before they inched onto the Net, Photoshop was built to serve the bandwidth-irrelevant medium of print. Similarly, the company's most-used Web product, the Acrobat reader, is intended to make Web pages look better when they're printed out, not when they're viewed on a screen. Adobe's most important new product is undoubtedly InDesign, an attempt to retake the high-end desktop publishing market from Quark (dossier).
Even as Adobe turns the corner financially, with last quarter's per-share earnings nearly 20 percent above First Call analyst expectations, its print-centric orientation does not make sense in an increasingly Web-centric software world. Unlike Microsoft (MSFT), a much larger company that took too long to get Net religion, Adobe does not have a huge captive market that has no choice but to wait while the company works out its Web plans. For every savvy Web move the company makes - like purchasing the popular GoLive site-creation package - it comes up with a silly notion like building a proprietary pay-per-view feature into Acrobat that goes against the essence of both Net culture and the Net Economy.
An analysis of Adobe's product lines suggests that the unspoken mission of the company may be to make the Web more like print. Print out your Acrobat document and lose whatever useful interactivity may have been embedded in the original Web page; save your PageMaker desktop publishing document in HTML so your company's flat Web page can mirror its print collateral. It's an attitude typical of veteran graphic designers who still insist that the bandwidth, palette and standardization problems of the current Web far outweigh the medium's advantages in distribution, audience reach and new functionality. Rather than address the new formats on their own terms, the thinking goes, it's safer to consider the new in tried-and-true terms.
This attitude will work only until the Web matures. Currently, the Internet is so new to many businesses that it's treated as just another print outlet, albeit one with lower resolution. By the time people move past that, only those companies that offer tools geared to the strengths of the new medium will thrive. A bolder and potentially more fruitful calling for Adobe might be to flip the current mission and aim to make print more like the Web.
There's reason to believe Adobe might be considering a tentative move in this direction. In addition to Photoshop, the company used to sell ImageReady, a less-extensive graphics tool intended for Web use. (It is similar to Macromedia (MACR)'s Fireworks.) Now, with the release of Photoshop 5.5, ImageReady is no longer a separate program; it's part of Photoshop. For whatever reason, Adobe is slowly incorporating more Web functionality into its products. And yet these products are still print-centric at their core.
The big question is whether there is any short-term pressure on Adobe to embrace its inevitable future. Its present has a satisfied constituency: Wall Street responded with glee to the company's recent earnings report and its announcement of a two-for-one stock split. Moving from print-centric to Net-centric would create turmoil in the organization and it wouldn't come cheap.
In today's environment - when daytraders can't remember yesterday morning's stock price, let alone last quarter's results - such a long-term strategy might not earn the company many friends in the financial markets. But in the long term, it's the
