John Gruber has an interesting article in Daring Fireball about the evolution of Adobe from a company run by passionate engineers, focused on producing great software for creative production, to one focused on sales for their own sake.
Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that’s completely at odds with the creative market they’ve dominated for nearly two decades.
Adobe’s best and core products are their oldest, and they are graphics products: PostScript, the Adobe Type Library, Illustrator, and Photoshop. InDesign is relatively new but genuinely fits alongside these products. This is why Adobe’s core customers — who still use and love many of their products — are dismayed and confused by the company’s direction in recent years. But is it any surprise that a company that is run by jerks-wearing-suits is now targeting the jerks-wearing-suits software market?
Oren Sreebny 