I was told the other day that Acrobat is by far the main profit engine for Adobe Corporation, and that their all other products like Photoshop etc. even combined together are very small potatoes in comparison. Is this true?
That doesn’t make any sense to me.
Acrobat Reader for looking at PDFs is free and very common. The full version of Acrobat is a PDF creation and editing program, with plugins for the likes of Microsoft Office. There’s an expensive version that lets you put 3-D documents, such as from CAD systems, in PDFs. The full version of Acrobat can’t be much more common than all of their design software (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, FrameMaker, etc, etc) put together, and they charge a hefty price for Photoshop alone.
True, Adobe has an online service at acrobat.com, but isn’t that fairly new? And now that PDF has been opened as a standard, all sorts of other companies are incorporating PDF creation into their products. Heck, PDF creation is built in at the OS level in Mac OS X. I’d guess that the Acrobat program is a decreasing fraction of Adobe’s revenues. Can they make up for it with online services through acrobat.com? Good question.
On the other hand, though, Acrobat is something that gets used a lot in business – I think I used a professional version of whatever Adobe’s PDF creation program is in the last three jobs I’ve held. Since I didn’t pay for it, I don’t know the prices that Adobe was charging the companies I worked for, but I can’t imagine it’s particularly small.
The last place I worked had some graphic designers and I’m pretty sure they used Adobe Creative Suite and paid for it, but a quick look at one of the leading software piracy sites shows that Adobe CS makes up four out of the top 10 (and five out of the top 11) programs. I imagine (at least, it’s been my experience) that that sort of rampant piracy isn’t quite as common with document creation software.
Your mileage may vary, of course.
Just speculating but part of it may be that other applications have more competitors. I realize there are other PDF creators, but not as many as for other Adobe products. Like Photoshop is a great program but there are tons of free programs just as or nearly as good. It was only 4 years ago that Adobe bought Macromedia, so a lot of those sales of products by Macromedia, probaby don’t count as they were sold under a different company and are still in use.
Indeed I still use Excel '97 'cause it does everything I want and don’t need an upgrade. If people bought Flash under Macromedia they may not have replaced it under Adobe.
Adobe also has issues that the folk who promote “free standards” are against Flash and PDF becoming defacto standards. So this gives those people, often very creative motive to design against Adobe products.
I don’t think Adobe publishes how much each product earns in revenue. Unless your friend works for Adobe, I’d wager he’s only guessing.
This sounds about right to me. Photoshop, Premiere, etc are all great software, but very specialized. Lots of people may use them, but the average person has probably never seen an honest-to-gosh licensed version.
Every office I’ve ever worked in has had at least one license for Acrobat (~$700) and several have sprung for volume licensing, even when the bulk of users could get by with Reader.
You can find the most recent annual SEC filing here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/fy08_10k.pdf
On pages 4 to 22, they outline their various business segments: Creative Solutions (which produces the CS suite), Knowledge Workers (which produces Acrobat as a standalone product), Enterprise and Print & Publishing.
On page 51, it is revealed that Creative Solutions is 58% of revenue. Knowledge Workers is 23% of revenue. Some of KW’s revenue is not from Acrobat and some of CS’s revenue is from Acrobat so we can’t allocate specific dollars to Acrobat.
But, clearly, everything else is NOT small potatoes. If anything, it’s Acrobat that is the marginal player in Adobe’s lineup.
On the other hand, Adobe has always seen Acrobat as a core technology in a way that Photoshop never will be. They once envisioned PDFs with hyperlinks and JavaScript as a replacement for HTML; I think their dreams remain equally lofty.
I have worked at Adobe, and dracoi has it right. The Creative Suites are a huge, just huuuge amount of revenue for Adobe. Acrobat certainly is no lightweight in the revenue department, but clearly not the majority of the company. Adobe is really diversified as a software company.
Not just a defacto standard. Link from Wikipedia
Flash still seems to be proprietary, though.
I’ve heard Adobe’s headquarters informally referred to as the Building that Photoshop Built, so obviously it’s made them more than marginal revenue.
Sort of.
You can download free PDFs from Adobe which describe the Flash format is fairly good detail. There’re apparently a few bits they’ve failed to document here and there, but it looks like they’re moving toward opening things up.
Agency side, you can’t get even one version behind when it comes to flash, photoshop, illustrator or any other adobe products - your clients and other agencies will have upgraded and you won’t be able to open about 50% of the files you receive within 6 months of a new version coming out.
Although new features are likely not needed, and rarely used, the designers push for new versions the moment they come out, and you have to play catch up with everyone else.
Yes … while there are certainly plenty of programs that do what PS, Illustrator, etc. can do, the Adobe Suite is the industry standard for creative professionals. Most pikers who noodle around with images for fun/home web sites/whatever don’t need all the tools these programs provide, or have no qualms about using pirated illegal copies, but if you’re putting out professional product for 4-color-press or whatever, legally licensed Photoshop & Co. are the go-to products. InDesign is less so for layout, but has been slowly gaining ground on Quark XPress. And, before Quark, PageMaker was THE THE THE layout program.
Why do you think the process of retouching an image for print is called “Photoshopping?”