Adobe Posts Its First Billion-Dollar Quarter | Hacker News Reader

Adobe Posts Its First Billion-Dollar Quarter

nytimes.com

31 pointsrjett26 comments

And with that kind of money, they can finally afford to implement secure software development, code review, fuzzing, & vulnerability testing.

We'll all be better off when they do.

Or maybe the 64 bit version of flash can get out of extreme beta.

Or maybe they can make Flash work properly on Linux?

There's hope - at least if you use nvidia.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=adobe...

According to that, hardware acceleration seems to work well in the current beta.

I would just like a decent installer for at least one of their products to start with.

If you're on debian this

  grep -q 'www.debian-multimediaa.org' /etc/apt/sources.list || (echo 'deb http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable main non-free' >> /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update)

  apt-get install flashplayer-mozilla
  apt-get install acroread

works well. :)

Looks like all the people who grew up using copied versions of the Adobe suite are finally buying it.

I'm one of them. I started toying with programming when I was ~14 using ActionScript and my pirated copy of Flash 4.

Ah, those were the times.

Not a very informative article. They left out tons of information, such as that the growth is coming from their business products like LiveCycle (the article doesn't even recognize that side of their business). Also Adobe is spinning the Creative Suite story as "sales for the latest release are higher than they were at this point in time for the previous release" but my understanding from the sketchy articles out there, is that, overall, Creative Suite revenues are down a bit.

Are they thanking (loving) "Apple" in their release anywhere?

CS4 was widely panned and coupled with the poor economy, many companies skipped it. Adobe took a loss this quarter last year. The article doesn't state it but many CS3 owners have upgraded to CS5 because of the improving economy, some new features and not wanting to be too far behind software revisions.

Where does it make all this money on? The article just mentions that they make Photoshop, Acrobat and Flash..and the Adobe press release doesn't provide any additional information.

I work on Adobe LiveCycle, which is an enterprisey do-everything suite. The creative suite software is still the biggest seller at Adobe, though.

CS, PhotoShop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premier, Flash, Dreamweaver, Scene 7, Macromedia Studio, After Effects, Go Live: 542.1 mill

Acrobat, LiveCycle, ColdFusion, Flex: 274.1 mill

Omniture: 98.4 mill

PostScript, FrameMaker, PageMaker, Macromedia Contribute, Macromedia Captivate, Macromedia FreeHand: 47.3 mill

PDF & Flash Platform Revenue: 46.1 mill

Damn, none of the big stuff (the creative products) seem like particularly easy markets to compete. Acrobat might represent the best opportunity, but that thing is ingrained.

I look at this list and I am thrilled that I don't have to use a single one of these. I'm not even friends with anyone that does, except a couple of photographers.

I'd love to know how much of the 46.1 million of the "PDF & Flash Platform Revenue" and the 274.1 million of the "Acrobat, LiveCycle, ColdFusion, Flex" is purely PDF related. How many people are buying Adobe Acrobat just to edit PDFs, documents that should be source code but aren't?

I just hate it when digital things become analog (or virtually analog, like PDF) and I doubly hate it that tools get built for editing the now analog digital document. Like OCR for Faxes, UGH!

Newest piece from The Onion: "Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Use Adobe Products"

Do you have a source for your numbers? I've heard it being much more skewed towards Acrobat, so I'm curious if that's just old data or what.

It's the latest data from their q4'10 earnings report, specifically this pdf http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/pdfs/q410_ir_da...

Maybe they can now start on some of these: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

Any news on a possible Flash export-to-html5 feature?

Too bad, hope Adobe dies forever soon. All of their stuff has become bloated and horrible (Flash the worst among them), and unless there is a serious internal restructuring, I have little hope that decency will return.

I really hope flash goes away too, but I don't see software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, etc going away anytime soon.

The nice thing about desktop software is that it doesn't vanish with its authors. If Adobe crumbles or restructures, Photoshop et al will be there just the same as they were, and people can continue to use them. Meanwhile, if people thought they could get a serious hold where Photoshop once stood (because Photoshop became unmaintained, which I doubt would happen, even if Adobe dies; Photoshop is a huge asset and I'm sure the ashes of Adobe could get a pretty good price based on that alone), the gap would be filled relatively quickly.

Nearly all current Adobe products require activation. The only one I'm familiar with that doesn't is Acrobat.

While this is annoying, it's not impossible to get around...

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