Adobe 2001 Annual Report Download - page 12

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ePaper Solutions
In electronic document delivery, exchange, collaboration, and archive markets, the electronic forms
market, and the PDF file creation market, our Adobe ePaper product family faces competition from
entrenched office applications and increased competition from new emerging products and technologies.
Current office applications and Internet content creation/management tools that use Microsoft Word,
XML, HTML, and Tagged Information File Format (‘‘TIFF’’) file formats compete with Adobe PDF and
Adobe’s ePaper product family. In addition, Microsoft’s new Office XP suite targets business users that
want improved collaborative document review, scanning/optical character recognition (‘‘OCR’’), and
security capabilities, in competition with similar features offered by Adobe’s ePaper products family.
In the PDF file creation market, our Adobe ePaper product family faces competition from clone
products such as the Jaws product line from Global Graphics (formerly Harlequin), and other smaller PDF
creation solutions that can be found for free on the World Wide Web. In the area of electronic forms
solutions, we face competition from Cardiff and Microsoft, as well as from Accelio (formerly Jetform)
unless and until our proposed acquisition of Accelio is consummated.
We believe the Adobe ePaper product family competes favorably against these companies and formats
in terms of the combined benefits of superior functionality, file compression, visual page fidelity/reliability,
transmittal time, and security of documents expressed using Adobe PDF.
Looking to the future, electronic document systems targeting enterprises that utilize emerging
standards such as XML and Microsoft’s.NET initiative are being developed and will likely be adopted.
Adobe is working to ensure that compatibility and/or migration plans exist between these formats/
platforms and the Adobe PDF format, as well as our Acrobat software products and other Adobe
applications.
OEM PostScript and Other
We believe that the principal competitive factors for OEMs in selecting a page description language or
a printing technology are product capabilities, market leadership, reliability, price, support, and
engineering development assistance. We believe that our competitive advantages include our technology
competency, OEM customer relationships, and intellectual property portfolio. Adobe PostScript and
Adobe Extreme software face competition from Hewlett-Packard’s proprietary PCL page description
language and from developers of page description languages based on the PostScript language standard,
including Global Graphics (formerly called Harlequin) and Xionics.
Although Adobe has numerous OEM customer relationships that license Adobe PostScript
technologies, revenues from a small number of the OEMs make up a majority of the revenue in this
market segment.
OPERATIONS
Marketing and Sales
We market and distribute our products through sales channels, which include distributors, retailers,
systems integrators, software developers, and value-added resellers (‘‘VARs’’), as well as through OEM
and hardware bundle customers. We also market and license our products directly using our sales force,
Adobe call centers, and through e-commerce methods via our Adobe.com Web site.
We support our worldwide distribution network and end-user customers with international offices
around the world, including locations in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Denmark, England,
Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands,
Norway, Portugal, Scotland, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan.
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