Opinion: In merging, acquiring, and warring with hackers, Adobe's starting to grow up as a company. Its corporate policies should follow suit.So I went before a judge this week and she hit me and about 25 other speeders with $360 fines, mandated by state laws passed a few months ago.
No one knows for sure what the judge really felt, for it was her responsibility to respect the venue of the court as well as the dignity and authority of the state troopers representing the prosecution.
But you get the picture that she was sympathetic, because she apologetically explained to us speeding miscreants that these new laws give her no discretion for reducing our fines.
That, and she kept saying, "Well, there won't be as many presents under one more Christmas tree!" after doling out a fine before the recorder called the next defendant.
Yet, compared to the 650 to 700 Adobe employees who got pink slips for presents this holiday season, I've got nothing to complain about.
Officially, CEO Bruce Chizen said yesterday, the company would cut that many Adobe and Macromedia jobs in the wake of their merger.
Click here to read about Adobe adopting a security patch schedule.
Rumor has it the layoffs already began, according to an anonymous Seattle Adobe employee talking to the Washington tech worker's union local Web site and two more interviewed by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Both pieces point out the irony that the layoffs come as Adobe-Macromedia's plans to expand its R&D operations in Noida and Bangalore, India next year.
Adobe announced the layoffs in the same conference call where the company told analysts its quarterly profits spiked 38 percent, conjuring images of Scrooge Chizen cackling "Bah, humbug!" all the way to the bank.
Sure, the federal government played a role in the timing of the layoffs, as it took its sweet time approving the merger. Sure, Adobe probably had to get the layoffs on the books in time for the end of Adobe's fiscal year. Sure, saying the Scrooge thing might get me off Adobe's Christmas card list—this time, for good—but still, one must admit that the timing's flat-out rotten.
Back when Acrobat was an unnamed product in development, John Warnock dubbed it Camelot. It seems, sometimes, that Adobe is attempting to project a Camelot-like image of itself to the outside world, a mythical kingdom where hackers don't hack, outsourcing doesn't happen and PDF is an impenetrable fortress securing business data everywhere.
Maybe it's not Camelot as much as something out of Pleasantville or The Truman Show.
It's actually kind of funny when my Adobe sources are forced to refuse to officially acknowledge whether or not the next version of Acrobat's even in development, let alone what its name might be.
But it's not so funny when Adobe gets knocked around as the little graphics software company that could.
Moving into the enterprise world with Acrobat, pundits and competitors allege, Adobe's a little fish in a big pond, unprepared for the challenges such a migration brings.
Before the layoffs came up, it appeared this week that Adobe was well on its way to shedding that image, finally. It announced plans to release security patches for all applications on a monthly basis, as opposed to the fire drill that happens when something really bad comes up.
While that's a little announcement in the big scheme of things, to me it says that Adobe's dropping the "fortress PDF" pretense and acknowledging that stuff happens. Hack-ins are routine for everyone else, and now we're admitting that, yeah, we're in the same arms race that IBM, Microsoft and other software developers must run to keep ahead of the bad guys.
No more occasional escapades that go something like "Ooops, someone hacked our security scheme, here's a patch we put together, now go download it!" and a cascade of negative stories.
Instead, Adobe's designed a routine, orderly way of dealing with the problem.
Welcome to the real world, I was thinking.
Then the layoffs story came out, sort of like the security patch thing used to work: "Ooops, another layoff!"
Maybe the layoffs thing is part of the real world, too. Is it downsizing or outsourcing going on? A little of both, I'm guessing.
In an e-mail, an Adobe spokesperson acknowledged that the company plans to hire 300 engineers in Noida and Bangalore, and that the Indian facilities also sustained layoffs in the wake of the Macromedia merger.
Click here to read about Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia.
She couldn't provide data about which Adobe facilities sustained how many layoffs.
In other industries, many companies announce when and where layoffs will take place, well in advance.
Adobe's policy is at least partly attributable to software industry custom. Not many of Adobe's peers give their employees and shareholders the detailed heads up about personnel realignments that, say, manufacturing companies do.
But what if they did? Maybe Adobe would be considered a leader, more innovative and conscientious than its peers.
It's time for Adobe to join the fraternity of big-boy software companies. The monthly security-patch updates are a small step toward membership.
But being more transparent about corporate machinations would go a long way toward earning the company the respect it so craves among the Microsofts and IBMs of the world.
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