Adobe: Our Friend?


Silicon.com has published a wide-ranging interview with Adobe CEO Bruce Chitzen. In the piece, Chitzen canvasses the Apple-Intel switch, amongst myriad other topics.

Chitzen argues that Apple is competing with MS for IT talent and that MS faces challenges in recruiting the best, particularly as Redmond's stock options aren't what they were 5 years ago.

How does Chitzen view Apple's business? "They have a very stable, loyal customer base," he says, although he appears here to be referring to Mac sales, not iPod, which of course drives much profitability.

However, he does recognize the importance of Apple's pro customer graphics base to Adobe's business; the fact that these key customers haven't defected to the Windows platform is critical to Adobe's profitability.

On the processor front, Chitzen supports the Intel switch strongly; it reduces Adobe's workload, costs and development time, although the switch itself will be hard work and take some time.

But overall, Chitzen is positive about the move to Intel: "in theory, because we work closely with Intel we should be able to take advantage of the optimisation that we do around Intel at the native level, especially for graphics and video applications."

Analysis: Chitzen does kinda-sorta sidestep the question of graphics performance; after all, it's well known that RISC and PowerPC in particular is better at crunching graphics than Intel's current range of processors. Still, with better graphics cards available more quickly and cheaply to Apple using Intel processor boards, any performance gap should disappear.