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Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld Expo

By | December 4, 2008, 7:27am PST

Summary: Adobe Systems, Inc. announced yesterday in a statement that it will eliminate 600 full-time positions, or roughly 8 percent of its workforce, amid weaker than expected fourth quarter earnings. Fellow ZD blogger Larry Dignan notes that demand for Creative Suite 4 was weaker than expected and the main cause for the shortfall in fourth quarter revenue. [...]

Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld ExpoAdobe Systems, Inc. announced yesterday in a statement that it will eliminate 600 full-time positions, or roughly 8 percent of its workforce, amid weaker than expected fourth quarter earnings.

Fellow ZD blogger Larry Dignan notes that demand for Creative Suite 4 was weaker than expected and the main cause for the shortfall in fourth quarter revenue. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen added that the global economic downturn hurt revenue.

The layoffs come a day after the San Jose, CA-based software developer announced that it will not have a booth at the upcoming Macworld Expo trade show and conference in San Francisco which runs from 5-9 January 2009.

Adobe has decided to shift its focus at the Macworld trade show this year… Macworld is a valuable industry show and we will still be an active part of it with members of our product team involved in Macworld tracks, including a full day of CS4 demo sessions with Adobe evangelists on Wednesday, January 7.

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Adobe Systems Inc., Macworld, Workforce Management, Operational Accounting, Human Resources, Finance, Jason D. O\'Grady

Jason O'Grady is a journalist and author specializing in mobile technology. He has published six books on Apple and mobile gadgets and his PowerPage blog has been publishing for over 15 years.

Disclosure

Jason D. O'Grady

Jason D. O'Grady is the creator and editor of O'Grady's PowerPage, which has been publishing mobile technology news since 1995. He maintains an advertising relationship with the following legacy advertisers on the PowerPage:

  • Amazon Associates
  • Google Adsense
  • Tekserve

    • Advertising on the PowerPage is brokered by a third-party agency (BackBeat Media) and he recuses himself from these negotiations.

Biography

Jason D. O'Grady

Jason D. O'Grady developed an affinity for Apple computers after using the original Lisa, and this affinity turned into a bona-fide obsession when he got the original 128 KB Macintosh in 1984.

He started writing one of the first Web sites about Apple (O'Grady's PowerPage) in 1995 and is considered to be one of the fathers of blogging. He has been a frequent speaker at the Macworld Expo conference and a member of the conference faculty. He also co-founded the first dedicated PowerBook User Group (PPUG) in the United States.

After winning a major legal battle with Apple in 2006, he set the precedent that independent journalists are entitled to the same protections under the First Amendment as members of the mainstream media.

O'Grady is the author of The Nexus One Pocket Guide, The Droid Pocket Guide, The Google Phone Pocket Guide, and The Garmin nuvi Pocket Guide (Peachpit Press), the author of Corporations That Changed the World: Apple Inc. (Greenwood Press), and a contributor to The Mac Bible (Peachpit Press). In addition, he has contributed to numerous Mac publications over the years, including MacWEEK, Macworld, and MacPower (Japan).

When he's not writing about Apple for ZDNet at The Apple Core, he enjoys spending time with his family in New Jersey.

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RE: Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld Expo
jackson1984-24316069205748857739440257893812 11th Oct
We had been carrying out a lookup and discovered this online website. I confess that this text is nfljersey on phase! Maintain it up. I am going to be adhering to your posts
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0 Votes
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Weaker?
Kaiwai 4th Dec 2008
Fellow ZD blogger Larry Dignan notes that demand for
Creative Suite 4 was weaker than expected and the main
cause for the shortfall in fourth quarter revenue.

Its weaker demand is porportional to the fact that it was a
crap upgrade. There is hardly anything in the product itself
to justify why a person should move from CS 3.3 let along
CS 3.0. It's pathetic money grubbing by CEO's on million
dollar salaries who think that a few thousand dollars for
software is 'chump change'. Maybe someone should inform
these idiots about the current state of the economy.
0 Votes
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My thoughts exactly!
voyager529 4th Dec 2008
While there were some new "huh, that's cool" features in CS4 over CS3, ultimately it wasn't a very compelling upgrade and at that it was very close to CS3. If I paid $1,699 last year, I'm probably not going to be upgrading to CS4 right now. It's a tough market out there (and obviously Adobe knows it since they laid off 600 people) and if the current CS3 suite does what I need it to do, then I'm not camping out to get CS4 right now. This is just common sense.

Adobe probably would have been better off waiting until next year to release CS4, and added a few more features in order to make CS4 a more desirable product. Back in the early days of these apps, going from Photoshop 4.0 to 5.0 or Indesign 1.0 to 2.0, There was usually a laundry list of must-have features in each upgrade. Adobe seems to have gotten complacent; each upgrade has had fewer and fewer of these new features while the price has greatly escalated. Henceforth, it has become more common for people to skip versions and get every other version or every third version; cumulatively two or three versions tend to have enough features to justify the cost.

Finally, Adobe seems to have a habit of adding things that are visible on the surface. This is understandable from a marketing perspective (customers must feel like their money has bought them something), but Adobe users are generally more savvy than the average Myspace person and as such i would venture to guess that if they did some under-the-hood stuff that they would have plenty of places to do stuff. Trimming the bloat (CS2 installation of Production Premium for the stuff I use: 1.8GBytes. CS3 install: 8.5. Premiere 6.5: 85MBytes. Premiere Pro 1.5: 260MBytes. CS3: 1.4GBytes {though in its defense that also accounts for Encore as well}), making better use of the GPU, and reducing startup times are all places where Adobe can make improvements, and I'd dare say that most customers would be quite happy with these.

Joey
0 Votes
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Good time for Apple to buy them
j.m.galvin 4th Dec 2008
Adobe stock is less than 1/2 its 52
eek high. Their market cap is now
under 12 billion - less than half of
Apple's cash hoard.
0 Votes
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RE: Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld Expo
ccrashh2@... 4th Dec 2008
Maybe if they spent less time and effort ensuring that their products are bloated (I recently saw an Adobe Reader folder of over 200Mb!), and more time developing efficient applications, they wouldn't have "weaker" than expected results.
0 Votes
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Time to sue M$ for monopolistic abuse
Linux Geek 4th Dec 2008
There is one good reason why Adobe's revenue fall and we all know why.
It's time for action to stop the M$ beast.
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If I were you,
Confused by religion 4th Dec 2008
... I would sue the person who put that sponge in your head and called it a brain!
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Isn't just so much software out there "good enough"
Boot_Agnostic 4th Dec 2008
that there is little "need" to upgrade to a newer version even if there is want. Not just for Adobe but OSes, office suites, media players, applications that are tried true and so to say boring, technical and 'job' related?
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Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld Expo
Metronome49 5th Dec 2008
I think thes comments come from a perspective of what you use, and not a perspective of the entire suite.

They have some products that are almost perfect already (PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects{debateable}), that they added things to that would really benefit some people, but not all i.e. 3-D in Photoshop, multiple artboards to Illustator, InDesign-to-Flash support... good stuff, but not for everyone. What really came out to shine in CS4 is what was seriously lacking in CS3... a cohesion between their old flagship products and their newly acquired MX products. I don't know if you work with web, but a Dreamweaver with a live WebKit rendering engine for testing and After Effects style keyframe controls in Flash is amazing and makes me wish I had a system that could even run CS4 right now.

A lot of the other comments sound like they are from people who don't use the Suite, or only use PhotoShop as a hobby and Acrobat at work. It's not meant for you.

I think they have just been scrambling a bit with the Macromedia acquire and integration.

You may not see it as a necessary upgrade, but I don't think you've seen everything. And you won't find it necessary until you find something you can't do that you need to.
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Release Adobe Photoshop V5.0 and Illusrator V7.0 as pro-sumer package
tmccorm 5th Dec 2008
I am not a professional graphics artist. All I need is a tools which are the equivalent of Photoshop 5 and Illustrator 7. (I still use these tools.)

I can't justify upgrading ever year for professional grade features that I do not need.
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RE: Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld Expo
gregoryflack@... 8th Dec 2008
our advertising department (for a big retail chain) uses Mac 10.4 with CS2 - CS2 doesn't play well with Mac Leopard.
We'd have to upgrade both - so we will wait until both can be done more cost effectively - we won't hold our breath though.
0 Votes
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Maybe they could charge a little less for the software
technology@... 9th Dec 2008
Maybe it is just me, but the price for the suite is ridiculous. They have perfected their licensing, making it a painful process (especially if you are transferring a license from a dead machine to a new one).

What if they gave a trial run of a more active validation process. If they offered a version of CS4 for $200 with a validation daemon that sends a unique identifier (like the MAC ID or computer SN) and license information to Adobe for validation every time the software is run, I would not be surprised if they received hundreds of thousands if not millions of new orders. Users who don't want their "personal information" such as computer serial numbers sent to Adobe could opt to pay the big bucks.

If the computer is run when not connected to the Internet, the software keeps a tally of the number of times this happens. Every time the computer is connected and the software runs, the tally is reset. If the number gets to an arbitrary threshold, the software becomes disabled until a user reconnects to the Internet. This would give flexibility to the itinerant designer/consultant.

I am sure there are flaws, but I just took about 5 minutes coming up with this, so I am sure the brilliant minds at Adobe could figure out how to make this work better.
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Too expensive...
Metronome49 10th Dec 2008
It's only too expensive if you are not going to make money using it. It's paid for in one job. It's professional software, for making things, as a business. Not for hobbyists. If you want to make backgrounds for deviant art, or make a website about your cat... get freeware, or steal.
0 Votes
+ -
RE: Adobe lays off 600; skips Macworld Expo
jackson1984-24316069205748857739440257893812 11th Oct
We had been carrying out a lookup and discovered this online website. I confess that this text is nfljersey on phase! Maintain it up. I am going to be adhering to your posts

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