I'm not sure this is a sufficient explanation.
McCarthy left in 2010. But it looks like the decline in the "designy"-ness began in 2006.
McCarthy left in 2010. But it looks like the decline in the "designy"-ness began in 2006.
Edit: for Adobe, it may have coincided with significantly cutting back their Marketing/Communications department, which had a huge staff of really great artists in the 90's. I believe this became viewed as an extravagance to have a stable of really talented and creative artists and designers on staff when you can hire this stuff out and get "reasonable" results.
[1] example: https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/33241791/adobe-annual...
It dwindled out, but it is similar to corporate websites like SAP which were boring to death and made life in corporate a bane (we should study suicide and boredom-from-boring-documents in corporates), until all layers of management were naturally attracted to software created by little startups, even if it didn’t track time correctly, but it was cuter and nicer and didn’t require IE7.
Boredom-from-documents-and-websites is a key factor for people’s choice of employment...
Sarbanes-Oxley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarbanes%E2%80%93Oxley_Act
Which is about corporate financial responsibility, generally speaking.
Signed in to law July 30, 2002