Adobe aims at the YouTube Generation

Bruce Chizen believes there is a potential market of 38 million "aspiring professionals or amateurs" for Adobe design software, a bigger future than the 3 million professionals "who return for each new software edition and continue to buy other Adobe products".

Reporting the JP Morgan Technology Conference for the CNET News Blog, Candace Lombardi quoted Bruce Chizen as saying-

"Because of the social sites and sites like YouTube, everyone wants to create stuff that looks cool."

This may explain the current emphasis on Flash and an apparent lack of interest in print. The number of people still working on design for hard copy is probably much lower than 3 million. The rather boring design found in many PDF documents is left over from the tradition of hard copy and is only suitable for corporate documents and academics. Adobe seems to be concentrating on Flash for forms design, through the Apollo project. There appears to be a theory that video has established an environment of movement and that boredom will set in if text stays in one place.

At Adobe Live in London next month there will probably not be much attention for print, but an emphasis on video and mobile devices.

Chizen was also asked about price differences around the latest versions of Creative Suite and appeared to concentrate more on the widest potential market. "We don't want to alienate the 38 million-plus noncreative professionals ( maybe this should read "creative non-professionals") . We have a lot of customer loyalty. We know customers will pay more, but we don't want them hating us 'cause we know that that will come back to haunt us. I don't want our customers to have a perception of Adobe like the perception some have with Microsoft--like they're being held hostage."

There was no follow-up question about customers in Europe or other places outside the USA. It might be assumed that any software established as a standard in the USA will also be a standard outside the USA. So the perception of being held hostage would be less of a problem, from a marketing perspective. Creative Suite pricing in Europe has been widely criticised. See for example a Man With a Pencil and this online petition.

The positioning and price policy on Adobe products may reflect an assumed timeline but there are some variations that are hard to understand. Both Photoshop and Premiere have an "Elements" version that offers excellent value for features that suit many people. However the Acrobat "Elements" offer is intended only for large sites with a minimum of 100 seats. By contrast there is now a free offer of limited video editing through Photobucket.

Perhaps PDF is now seen as a legacy product alongside Postscript and 'classic publishing'. The market is expected to decline as video takes over all forms of communication. So there is no point in changing price levels originally intended for "early adopters".

However, one consequence could be more interest in open source graphics including Open Office and Scribus, both of which create PDF. Indesign and Quark have added features in recent years but Scribus now offers most of the classic aspects of desktop publishing.

Adobe are moving fast into video and an animated web. They are seeking a much wider audience for design tools. The designers with a background in hard copy are forced to consider why this is happening and to appreciate current changes in the way people consume media. Anomolies in pricing are only one of the issues arising.