Friday, September 19, 2008

Charles Geschke has been interviewed for Knowledge at Wharton. He concludes-

We'll never succeed unless we continue to open up new vistas.

I honestly believe that our technology and what's happening in the market -- where essentially all visual communication is going to the web -- is the sweetheart point in our whole envelope of products and technologies. Shame on us if we can't figure out a way to take advantage of that shift in the way the world is moving with the distribution of information.

A lot of what are there today -- the limitations of browsers and of the web imaging standards -- are things that we think we have a solution for. As they become the primary delivery mechanism, that value is going to differentiate
.

So I guess the web is going to be the main emphasis next week when more is announced around Creative Suite. My impression is that a lot of people, including those who work in education and most organisations, are still used to documents as in flat pages of text. So most of the new direction will pass them by. I am still interested in the classic Adobe topics of XML and PDF.

Geschke is a case study in leadership. At the Learning Technology discussions in the Uk I find few examples of pressure from senior management as a driver for e-learning. Adobe seems to have been designed around learning and innovation, beyond the original research. The Macromedia concerns seem to be upfront in the current phase. Geschke and Warnock are not often in the public view recently so this interview is worth a look from business students.