The merger between Adobe and Omniture has recently closed. Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Adobe, calls the merger “a game changer for Adobe and its customers” and additionally says:
“Adobe’s Creative Suite products and Flash platform help customers create and deliver engaging experiences. The addition of Omniture’s online marketing suite will help customers measure, analyze and optimize the impact and value of those experiences creating a continuous feedback loop.”
Here’s a nice graph simply depicting the value proposition:
Based on this diagram, one could conclude that the technology resulting from the merger will assist the creation and delivery of internet advertising only in an information-providing role, allowing ad creators and traffickers to make changes based on incoming data from the new reporting arm of Adobe.
It can’t help but raise a few questions, however. How does Adobe make it easy for advertising agencies to make their content communicate effectively with the Omniture platform without changing the content authoring process? How does Adobe optimize the delivery process based on real-time data (becoming more of the norm every day) without sticking their nose into the delivery process in some way? And how do they do either without stepping on the toes of a number of partners invested in advertising content creation and delivery?
Adobe is at somewhat of a crossroads. One of their core competencies to date, making tools for creative content developers, is under siege from a few different directions. Open source tools and code libraries, alongside the popularity of digital photography, threaten to commoditize the functionality provided by Photoshop, Adobe’s crown jewel on the content authoring side. Witness the Gimp, or Pixelmator, the inexpensive Photoshop alternative built by two people using the GPL’d ImageMagick software libraries. On the competitive front, it’s no secret Apple has taken a significant bite out of the video authoring market with Final Cut Pro. And, in addition, it’s beginning to look like Adobe has been headed off at the pass by web technologies in their quest to make Flash a key development platform for mobile, since mobile devices have gotten browsers before they have gotten decent Flash player support.
Also, consider the following list of 45 interactive prototyping tools:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2009/03/24/rapid-prototyping-tools
Adobe’s Flash Catalyst software is the only as-yet-unreleased software on the list. Considering their ownership of the marketplace for interactive and static design tools, you would think they would already have a clear lead in developing prototyping software for web applications, and yet there are small developers providing more viable alternatives. Even Microsoft has managed to pique the interest of designers (unthinkable!) with their new prototyping tool, SketchFlow.
The question I find myself asking (and hoping against) is – is Adobe weighing the success of Acrobat vs. the success of its creative toolset and deciding their money is better spent trying to somehow enterprise-ize their creative authoring tools than continuing to do the hard work of innovating in this marketplace? Maybe lock people into using Flash by making it the only tool that plays well with a reporting system tied to business analysis?
Many have their hat off to Adobe already for completing a successful merger with Macromedia, but try to find a Flash developer who likes Adobe Help better than Macromedia’s, or a designer who thinks that Flash is an easy tool to work with.
Don’t be fooled Adobe – there is still lots to be done making the next generation of creative content tools. You’ve already confused the designers who make up your core market for creative tools by bringing developers into the fold. Are you sure you want to start building in features for business analysts as well?