How far and fast the mighty has fallen. Adobe once was the King of the heap and then things changed.
Whose fault it was that Adobe got pushed to the curb or what forces brought this about are debatable. Being a long-time Adobe user I personally believe it was basically inertia and complancency.
Adobe sat back and rode the Desktop Publishing trend about as far as that horse could carry them. Along the way Adobe managed to piss off their many loyal creative customers with Draconian upgrade fees and program challenges to competitors that shouldn’t have become enemies: Their best application Photoshop became overpriced and eventually fell victim of cheaper powerful apps that do much of what Photoshop excelled at.
Their other suite of applications that were always expensive, difficult to upgrade and impossible to master.
At one point Adobe’s full forces were aligned behind Flash which proved to be a tecnology that did not play well with the rapidly advancing web. Apple became one of the first to take a strong anti-Flash stance but has since been joined by what seems the whole web ecosystem.
Is there still a future for Adobe? Of course there is! Adobe just has to stop hoping to find a key development that they can control like they did with Postscript or rely on lucking up on a masterful solution like they did when they bought Barneyscan and turned it into Photoshop. They still have some arrows like AIR in their quiver,
If Adobe studies and begins to utilize prevailing trends and standards rather that try to set them then there is indeed hope for Adobe but they need to get busy and work quick utilizing the enormous talent under their roof and that surrounds them in Silicon Valley. Adobe also needs to learn from their mistakes.
9/18/12 Adendum:
All of a sudden I am unable to open pdf files. They are reporting back that they are damaged and unrepairable. I went to the Adobe site and reinstalled the Reader which did not help. So what’s up with this?