Adobe Systems Inc. helped to shape the Desktop Publishing revolution of the '90s through its PostScript and PDF technology and such products as Adobe Illustrator, and it played an equally pivotal role in the emergence of digital imaging, providing key software applications such as Adobe Photoshop and standards proposals for file formats or media interchange technologies such as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) and the DNG (Digital Negative) format for professional digital photography. On the enterprise side, Adobe Acrobat and PDF have become the basis of a multilayered electronic document strategy. Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer of Adobe, spoke with Andreas Pfeiffer, editor of the Pfeiffer Report for Emerging Trends and Technologies, about Adobe's midterm perspective, the biggest opportunities and challenges for the company, emerging paradigm changes in technology, and the role of Adobe products in a cross-platform environment.

What do you see is the biggest opportunity for Adobe in a two-to-five-year perspective?

Well, if I take Adobe as a company, we have three major opportunities. On the creative professional side, there is still a lot of room to allow people to use more of our products. We are very excited about the prospects of video because we see the explosive growth of DVD playback, as well as broadband.

Video is a very compelling media and we think that over the next couple of years, all the creative professionals will look to extend their information to video. So video is one area that is of a lot of interest to us.

Another area of interest is also what happens to all these alternative devices. The number of devices that connect to the Internet other than PCs is going to exceed the number of PC devices connected to the Internet. So, how are people going to consume information on that? How are people going to create information for these devices? That is an area that we continue to spend a lot of our time and effort on.

I would continue to say, in larger companies, larger publishing houses, the whole area of workflow and integration with other systems that they have--that also is a total area of interest for us. And also what you are seeing on the enterprise side with our document server and our document services solutions. We are talking about publishing but on an enterprise scale. Those are among the areas that we think of as major opportunities.

Integration was an important feature of the first release of the Adobe Creative Suite. What do you see as the biggest challenges for going ahead with this?

The amount of creative ideas that exists in the world of Adobe is huge. So one of our challenges is always: How do you prioritize all these good ideas that you have? And how do you integrate the good ideas that we have with customers’ feedback?

The PDF workflow, even the whole notion of this digital master and how you take that from creative all the way out to print is another important aspect. There is still a lot of room for how we can get people to truly embrace this notion of a digital master all the way out. So that's a challenge of how we continue to have people look at the benefits of PDF for workflow.

But we realized that we had to really segment the product line. Because a number of things that we were doing for the creative professionals (color separations, preflighting …), a lot of the other customers really didn't require these functionalities. With the Acrobat Professional product we have really focused on the needs of the creative community.

Another aspect is to embrace PDF within the whole of our applications as their interchange format, whether that is for annotation or for sharing a digital master. So again that is an area where we have a lot of ideas as [to] how we can continue to enhance things.

Another challenge has to do with finding assets; the Photoshop file browser is a first step in that direction. One of the things that attracts us and intrigues us is: How do you create a desktop in which people can immerse themselves? If you are a creative professional, you think visually much more than in terms of file names. How can we create a more immersive experience or environment in which you are looking at your creation, whether it is an artwork, or an image file, or a page layout?

Do you find user adoption of new features difficult? Is that a hurdle?

We strive for value in our products. Customers are accustomed to a certain way of doing things, but when a new functionality is immediately useful, then people are willing to learn -- take the Healing Brush in Photoshop, for instance.

Or Photoshop RAW is another good example, as well as DNG. This is a response to a real-world customer need. We are all trying to standardize.

In a way you don't need much of an explanation when a new feature hits a nerve with users.

That's right. But we continue to focus on making things easier in each of our products. With Illustrator CS we asked ourselves, “OK, how can people start off with either preconfigured templates or the ability to start a project and maybe edit or change it?” This is not really required for the high-end creative professionals, but for somebody who doesn't do this for a living and is interested in producing that kind of compelling content, it can help them getting started. I think people are still a little apprehensive of the blank page when it first comes up.

Our notion is how do we get more task-based? The customers are trying to accomplish a particular task and [we're asking] how can we help them with that? And then, as they experiment, they learn all the advanced features, but it is put in the context of what the customer is trying to do. So that is one of the things that we continuously push at.

In a way, usability has become a killer feature. If you give the user a way to do a frequent operation in three steps instead of six, that can be much more important than a new feature that requires learning.

But the other one, frankly, is performance and putting the user in control of what they are trying to accomplish. Let's get rid of that hour glass. I don't know if you have had a chance to look at Acrobat 7 and what we have done with Acrobat 7 and with performance in that program. Now is performance a feature? I think so, yes. I think the customer to be able to do something quicker is something that is tremendously valuable.

What technologies do you see actually changing usage patterns--and which usage patterns change technology?

Well, I think you have both. Let's look at metadata with XMP. When we first started talking about XMP and metadata, we really came at it from, "OK, here is a technology and we are going to embed it in all of our applications, and it allows people to specify both creative intent in addition to the creation itself.” Frankly that started out first with, "This is your way of describing what the data is." But it is a technology-centric introduction and then people are starting to say "Wow, I can do this with it," and you know, "This is how I communicate," and XMP is getting more and more of a broader usage because people can say, "OK, if I now know what you did with that, I can do something with it after the fact."

Is the usage picking up on that? It is a big hurdle to get people to actually use metadata.

Well, I think our challenge there is how do we make it more and more automatic? I think you are starting to see what we are doing with respect to capturing all that information ourselves. And secondly is to demonstrate what that information looks like. So if you are starting to show what the XMP metadata is, then people might be more likely to say, "OK, let me edit that.” You have to bring it to the surface in terms of putting it in people's faces and showing them the possibilities, and then they start to use it. But in larger companies we are starting to see people saying they standardize on XMP.

Right now, there's again a lot of talk about moving from Macintosh to Windows, at least in the larger corporations. Interestingly, this seems always linked to the Adobe Creative Suite, which corrects some of the common problems of the Windows platform for publishing. Do you see the Creative Suite over time becoming a sort of operating system for visual communication?

Well, I think our strategy clearly is to deliver a platform to customers. And what we hear from our customers is that they are trying to figure out how they can express their creativity and communicate what they want, but across a variety of media--traditional, print and Web, video, wireless …

So, I think Creative Suite is certainly becoming a platform that enables people to immerse themselves on that platform to create content for multiple media types. In addition, we want the ability to allow people to extend our platform. We have talked about services that allow people to start to do more with the Creative Suite. And I think when we come up with our next version of the Creative Suite, you will certainly see us head more in that direction.

To come back to the midterm perspective, which technologies in your view are coming up for a sort of a paradigm shift? For instance, the file-and-folder paradigm is really cracking at the seams. Digital imaging is also becoming a huge subject. What are your thoughts on that?

I think helping people organize their content and search is clearly an integral part of that. I think that is one paradigm shift that we are hopefully pushing, helping people to collaborate, because creation is an inherently collaborative process.

I do believe that integration between our applications is very important.

There’s another one that we are consistently pushing on: to help people get the computer out of their mind, so to speak; to let them just focus on their publication or their artwork. This is something we need to constantly think about.

We are also continuing to look at the whole creative process. Take repurposing: I think we have just scratched the surface there. How do you create a campaign that a company can then use across print and Web and even these small phones that people are going to access it on? The new devices on which this information is going to be consumed are going to be another paradigm change.

The other one that I find very intriguing is the ways in which people consume this information. RSS is going to change many things. There is so much information out there: How can I subscribe to the information I want and how can I get only the information that I am looking for? I also think blogs are a very interesting technology: We are going from “one to many” publishing to “one to few.”

Cross-media started out as an interesting vision five years ago, but it has evolved slower than expected. How do you see this evolution?

I think the need to have a consistent campaign or a consistent message across all these different media types still exists. And frankly, I think that’s a challenge for companies like Adobe, to make it easier to do. Today people are sharing assets, then they might have to change the resolution of an image, or add more interactivity to the text, and add links if you are sending it to the Web. If you are sending it to a mobile phone, you need to change it as well. The need is still there for companies to say, “How can I do this in a more creative yet efficient manner.” We continue to hear it, but I think the evolution has taken longer than expected. Yet we are seeing some good uses of customers sharing their assets; even that is starting to save cost and helping to have a consistent brand across the different media types.

Despite the importance of the Web, print still remains the most high-profile communication you can choose. What are your thoughts on this evolution? How do you see the integration of digital and analog information?

I think print will continue to be important, as you said. We have also seen tests that show that retention of print materials tends to be higher than a lot of other media. But I think we will see use of different media in conjunction. Video, for instance: If I get a new car and I get a DVD rather than a brochure (or in conjunction with the brochure), that can be pretty compelling. I can sit in the car and I can look at what things are. So we do believe that video is going to play more of a role. And I think companies have to take a step back and say, “How do I put these all together, in a compelling campaign?” It is not about one vs. the other, frankly, it is about how do I use all of these in conjunction, so whoever wants to consume the information has it the way they want. But print will continue to be important.

Editor's Note: Andreas Pfeiffer is the editor in chief of the Pfeiffer Report, a newsletter offering news and analysis of the digital publishing and content creation market. The group has offices in Malakoff, France, and New York.