Adobe 2009 Annual Report Download - page 25

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25
Adobe Technical Communication Suite—includes Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended, Adobe Captivate, Adobe FrameMaker
and Adobe RoboHelp technologies; helps customers improve their workflows, especially technical communicators who want
a single solution to meet their content creation and publishing needs.
Adobe Type Library—includes Adobe’s best-selling typefaces, plus Adobe Type Manager; makes it easy to create
beautiful text for print, Web and video projects.
Adobe Type Classics for Learning—a low-cost, introductory font library designed for students and educators.
Adobe Type Manager—provides powerful, easy management of all PostScript Type 1, OpenType and TrueType fonts.
Adobe Type Sets—various collection packages of Adobe’s best-selling typefaces; makes it easy to create beautiful text
for print, Web and video projects.
FreeHand MX—a professional vector graphics tool designers and illustrators use to create high quality images that can
be scaled; supports developing images for print, the Web and Adobe Flash Player.
See Note 20 of our Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements for further information regarding our industry segments
and geographic information. See risk factor “We are subject to risks associated with global operations that may harm our
business” in Item 1A of this report for a discussion of risks related to our foreign operations.
COMPETITION
The markets for our products are characterized by intense competition, evolving industry standards and business models,
disruptive software and hardware technology developments, frequent new product introductions, short product life cycles,
price cutting with resulting downward pressure on gross margins and price sensitivity on the part of consumers. 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 and respond to
emerging standards, business models, software delivery methods and other technological changes.
Creative Solutions
In our Creative Solutions segment, we offer the Adobe Creative Suite in multiple editions which consist of combinations
of several of our technologies. In addition to offering the technologies within the Creative Suite editions, we also offer them
as individual software applications. These products compete with those from many companies, including Apple, Corel, Avid,
Quark, Microsoft and others, as well as from various open source initiatives.
With respect to Microsoft, their Expression Studio competes with our Adobe Creative Suite family of products as well
as individual Creative Solutions segment products. Expression Studio includes Microsoft Expression Design which competes
with our Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Adobe Fireworks products; Microsoft
Expression Blend which competes with our Adobe Flash Professional product; Microsoft Expression Web which competes
with our Adobe Dreamweaver product; and Microsoft Expression Media which provides digital asset management, basic
image editing and video encoding/compression capabilities and competes with some aspects of our video and hobbyist-
focused products. To compete with Adobe Flash, Microsoft markets its Silverlight product and technology which provides
capabilities for the creation of media experiences and interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation,
interactivity and user interfaces.
We believe our Adobe Creative Suite family of products competes favorably on the basis of features and functionality,
ease of use, product reliability, price and performance characteristics. The individual technologies within the Creative Suite
editions also work well together, providing broader functionality and shortened product training time for the individual who
uses multiple applications to complete a project.
We also believe our individual Creative products compete favorably against those offered by our competitors, as
discussed below.
Drawing and illustration products are characterized by feature-rich competition, brand awareness and price sensitivity.
In addition to competition with Microsoft’s Expression Design product, our Adobe Illustrator product faces competition from
companies such as ACDsee, Corel, Mediascape, Xara and the open source product called Karbon14. We believe our products
compete favorably due to high customer awareness of their rich features, especially the drawing and illustration
functionalities, the technical capabilities of the product and our ability to leverage core technologies from our other
established products.