Adobe 2003 Annual Report Download - page 15

Download and view the complete annual report

Please find page 15 of the 2003 Adobe annual report below. You can navigate through the pages in the report by either clicking on the pages listed below, or by using the keyword search tool below to find specific information within the annual report.

Page out of 107

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • 7
  • 8
  • 9
  • 10
  • 11
  • 12
  • 13
  • 14
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • 20
  • 21
  • 22
  • 23
  • 24
  • 25
  • 26
  • 27
  • 28
  • 29
  • 30
  • 31
  • 32
  • 33
  • 34
  • 35
  • 36
  • 37
  • 38
  • 39
  • 40
  • 41
  • 42
  • 43
  • 44
  • 45
  • 46
  • 47
  • 48
  • 49
  • 50
  • 51
  • 52
  • 53
  • 54
  • 55
  • 56
  • 57
  • 58
  • 59
  • 60
  • 61
  • 62
  • 63
  • 64
  • 65
  • 66
  • 67
  • 68
  • 69
  • 70
  • 71
  • 72
  • 73
  • 74
  • 75
  • 76
  • 77
  • 78
  • 79
  • 80
  • 81
  • 82
  • 83
  • 84
  • 85
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • 89
  • 90
  • 91
  • 92
  • 93
  • 94
  • 95
  • 96
  • 97
  • 98
  • 99
  • 100
  • 101
  • 102
  • 103
  • 104
  • 105
  • 106
  • 107

15
printers to high-end publishing printers; gives users the power to create and print visually rich documents with total
precision; licensed to printing equipment manufacturers for integration into their printing products.
Adobe Extreme — a printing architecture for service bureaus, prepress shops, and commercial printers; the
fastest, most flexible implementation of Adobe printing technology; provides an integrated workflow that automates
prepress tasks, optimizing output speeds and quality by using Adobe PDF and job tickets; offers flexibility while
delivering a scalable, reliable, and productive printing environment.
Adobe PDF Transit — a Software Development Kit that enables print providers to develop streamlined,
reliable, and secure Adobe PDF-based workflows that begins at their customers’ desktops and extends across the
Internet to a printing device.
COMPETITION
The markets for Adobe products are characterized by intense competition, evolving industry standards, rapid
technology and hardware developments, and frequent new product introductions. Our future success will depend on
our ability to enhance our existing products, introduce new products on a timely and cost-effective basis, meet
changing customer needs, extend our core technology into new applications, and anticipate or respond to emerging
standards and other technological changes.
Creative Professional
In our Creative Professional segment, we offer several individual software applications, including Adobe
GoLive, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe InDesign, Adobe InCopy, Adobe PageMaker, and Adobe FrameMaker. We
believe these individual products compete favorably on the basis of features and functionality, ease of use, product
reliability, and price and performance characteristics. In addition, the products work well together, providing
broader functionality and shortened product learning time for the individual who uses multiple applications to
complete a project.
We also offer the Adobe Creative Suite in two versions, which are new products that consist of combinations of
several of our technologies. The Adobe Creative Suite Standard Edition combines the capabilities of InDesign,
Illustrator, and Photoshop, as well as new file management and integration technology called Version Cue. The
Adobe Creative Suite Premium Edition adds to this the capabilities of Acrobat Professional and GoLive. The Adobe
Creative Suite is a complete design and publishing solution for print and Web publishing. We believe that no other
software vendor currently provides a similar solution.
Drawing and illustration products are characterized by feature-rich competition, brand awareness, and price
sensitivity. Our Adobe Illustrator product faces competition from companies such as Corel, Deneba, and
Macromedia. We believe our product competes favorably due to high awareness of the features in our Illustrator
product, especially the drawing and illustration functionalities, the features and technical capabilities of the product,
and our ability to leverage core technologies from our other established products.
Our Adobe InDesign product, used for professional page layout, faces tough competition. The main competitive
product, Quark XPress, has a leadership position in the professional page layout market. Quark also benefits from an
established industry infrastructure that has been built around the use of their XPress product in print shops and
service bureaus, and through the development of third party plug-in products. Barriers to the adoption of Adobe
InDesign by Quark XPress customers include this infrastructure, as well as the cost of conversion, training, and
software/hardware procurement required to switch to InDesign. We have seen an increase in the adoption of
InDesign software, and we believe we will continue to see market share gains going forward due to a product
offering that contains new innovative features (such as separations preview, nested styles, transparency, typography
and enhanced XML support), our strong brand among users, positive reviews by industry experts, adoption of
InDesign by major accounts which are influencers in their industries, and improved infrastructure support by the
industry for our overall solution.
The demand for Web page layout is constantly evolving and highly volatile. We believe Adobe GoLive trails in
market share and faces significant direct and indirect competition for Web page layout applications from companies