Adobe CEO Reports 'Muted' Effect of Apple's Relaxing of App Store Rules on Product Sales

[MacRumors]

The Wall Street Journal reports on comments from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen made during the company's earnings conference call indicating that Apple's recent decision to relax restrictions on third-party development tools for iOS app creation has had only a "muted" effect on Adobe product sales.

Narayen said in June the public squabble with Apple had not hurt sales of the company's software packages. But there was no denying that it had hurt the company's share price, which started the year around $37 but in June dropped below $27.

Earlier this month, Apple relaxed restrictions on developers of applications for its iPhones and iPads, opening up its popular App Store to products written in Flash.

However, the short-term impact of the change on product sales "was muted," Narayen said.

Adobe included in its new Flash Professional CS5 a feature known as "Packager for iPhone" that allowed developers to export Flash content in an iOS-compatible format to allow them to easily port their Flash apps for submission to the App Store. Just prior to the Adobe's product release, however, Apple modified its developer terms to ban such third-party development tools from being used for App Store submissions.

With Apple now lifting the restrictions, developers are free to use the existing Packager for iPhone feature and Adobe has said that it will resume work on the feature for future updates.

Despite strong performance during the previous quarter, Adobe's earnings guidance for the upcoming quarter fell below analysts' and investors' expectations, and the stock is down 20% today in response.

Article Link: Adobe CEO Reports 'Muted' Effect of Apple's Relaxing of App Store Rules on Product Sales

 

[neut]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Maybe adobe should actual advertise this toward developers and designers instead "praying" that sales will increase. I haven't seen Jack **** regaurding this from adobe's marketing department. You'd think with school in effect this would be a great selling point toward students (discounts).

Easy app development is the only thing that will save Flash and with HTML standards around the corner Flash will merely be a fallback technology.
_

..,V (^_^)

 

[pmjoe]

Oh, get real! Adobe lost 28% of it's share value because of the iPhone. A little reality please!

 

[WildCowboy]

Oh, get real! Adobe lost 28% of it's share value because of the iPhone. A little reality please!

Er, nobody's saying that. It might be one small factor, but clearly much more has played into Adobe's stock decline, most of which happened just last night and today in response to the earnings outlook.

 

[KnightWRX]

Maybe adobe should actual advertise this toward developers and designers instead "praying" that sales will increase.

Uh ? He said sales hadn't decreased from the squabble, so it stands to note that the people buying Flash bought Flash anyway.

 

[andiwm2003]

well, with the Adobe Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements bundle for $120 it would think they will get tons of sales.

I normally strongly support Pixelmator over Elements but with the rebates Elements is only ~60 bucks and you get quite a lot. Also on the windows side there is no big competition to Elements.

Adobe should focus on what they do very well (Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat, Lightroom and such) and cut the marketing crap. Then they will get premium prices for premium products.

Trying to get or maintain market dominance with a lousy product just hurts the brand and takes away resources from their core business.

 

[KnightWRX]

Adobe should focus on what they do very well (Photoshop, Premiere, Acrobat, Lightroom and such) and cut the marketing crap. Then they will get premium prices for premium products.

Trying to get or maintain market dominance with a lousy product just hurts the brand and takes away resources from their core business.

Are you guys even reading the article ? Where does it even say things like that ?

 

[Tres]

Adobe is a terrible company and most of their software is terrible too. I've had the unfortunate luck of being stuck working with Premiere and Encore over the last couple of years and I've never had a pair of software packages crash on me so regularly for apparently no reason. My current record is 7 crashes in one day with Premiere. I finished an entire project in Encore once and it just refused to export to DVD without even spitting up an error message, I had to rebuild the entire thing an hour before the deadline. If it was just me I'd think it was my computer, but my colleagues have been having similar issues.

I don't tend to use Photoshop a great deal, but my friends that do complain about it being terrible. From what I've read the .psd format is a bloated load of crap too.

And then there's Flash, laughably slow and terrible on Mac, unusably slow on Android (even though it's touted as a "feature").

Gee Adobe, I wonder why your stock price has dropped?

 

[drewyboy]

Adobe is a terrible company and most of their software is terrible too. I've had the unfortunate luck of being stuck working with Premiere and Encore over the last couple of years and I've never had a pair of software packages crash on me so regularly for apparently no reason. My current record is 7 crashes in one day with Premiere. I finished an entire project in Encore once and it just refused to export to DVD without even spitting up an error message, I had to rebuild the entire thing an hour before the deadline. If it was just me I'd think it was my computer, but my colleagues have been having similar issues.

I don't tend to use Photoshop a great deal, but my friends that do complain about it being terrible. From what I've read the .psd format is a bloated load of crap too.

And then there's Flash, laughably slow and terrible on Mac, unusably slow on Android (even though it's touted as a "feature").

Gee Adobe, I wonder why your stock price has dropped?

Amen! Same problems w/ premiere here. Not as often, but come on, I'm running a $6000 editing rig and I get these problems everyone writes off that I have a computer with insufficient requirements. Right, keep talking. Only thing good from Adobe: Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects.

 

[miknos]

Does apps creates in Flash (and exported to the app store) have the same crap performance as a native flash app ?

 

[Consultant]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16)

Maybe adobe should actual advertise this toward developers and designers instead "praying" that sales will increase. I haven't seen Jack **** regaurding this from adobe's marketing department. You'd think with school in effect this would be a great selling point toward students (discounts).

Easy app development is the only thing that will save Flash and with HTML standards around the corner Flash will merely be a fallback technology.
_

..,V (^_^)

Yeah epic advertising fail.

 

[willy-wonkapple]

Adobe is a terrible company and most of their software is terrible too. I've had the unfortunate luck of being stuck working with Premiere and Encore over the last couple of years and I've never had a pair of software packages crash on me so regularly for apparently no reason. My current record is 7 crashes in one day with Premiere. I finished an entire project in Encore once and it just refused to export to DVD without even spitting up an error message, I had to rebuild the entire thing an hour before the deadline. If it was just me I'd think it was my computer, but my colleagues have been having similar issues.

I don't tend to use Photoshop a great deal, but my friends that do complain about it being terrible. From what I've read the .psd format is a bloated load of crap too.

And then there's Flash, laughably slow and terrible on Mac, unusably slow on Android (even though it's touted as a "feature").

Gee Adobe, I wonder why your stock price has dropped?

i think people see "Flash" in the title of an article and immediately post their rant?

 

[PeterQVenkman]

i think people see "Flash" in the title of an article and immediately post their rant?

Mental conditioning, that's all.

Adobe is a terrible company and most of their software is terrible too. I've had the unfortunate luck of being stuck working with Premiere and Encore over the last couple of years and I've never had a pair of software packages crash on me so regularly for apparently no reason. My current record is 7 crashes in one day with Premiere. I finished an entire project in Encore once and it just refused to export to DVD without even spitting up an error message, I had to rebuild the entire thing an hour before the deadline. If it was just me I'd think it was my computer, but my colleagues have been having similar issues.

I have similar problems with Apple's software. I just had the wonderful Soundtrack Pro bug blow out my ear again yesterday morning, and FCP wouldn't import ANY file at all for about 4 hours yesterday - no quicktime movies, jpgs, tiffs, anything. And this is on top of my normal 10-12 crashes per day with FCS. I dread starting up Apple's crappy "pro" software.

The only software I have ever used on the mac with any rock solid stability has been Cinema 4d.

 

[magicfeather]

Try harder Adobe

I'm working with CS5 now - primarily after effects. Right now, I can't tell you anything that AE CS5 does that CS4 didn't do, other than not work with Zaxwerks. The plugin upgrade process to 64 bit was horrible. Nobody wants to upgrade because Adobe has no manager for plugins.

 

[gramtrax]

+1 for Adobe needs to try harder.

$600-$800 for an "upgrade" to a suite of products with only a couple new features means I'll gladly skip CS5, thank you.

 

[pcharles]

I normally strongly support Pixelmator over Elements but with the rebates Elements is only ~60 bucks and you get quite a lot. Also on the windows side there is no big competition to Elements.

I tried so hard to get out of Adobe's grips, but the alternatives (Pixelmator, Acorn, Vector Designer) that I tried just did not cut-it for what I wanted to do. I do not do anything complex, but found all three of them to be sluggish compared to Photoshop and Illustrator when working with larger documents.

I am not sure if it was something I was doing, or a problem with the programs, but opening large photos and adding layers rapidly became painful on my Macbook and Powermac G5. I have not tried them on my i7 iMac. Vector designer was one of the only applications to import my old Illustrator files and is a generally very nice program that I recommend, but again with large files (I was creating a vector version of a periodic table) it became really hard to scroll around.

In Photoshop (even elements) and Illustrator, I had no scrolling problems at all.

If Adobe created an Elements version of Illustrator I would be a very happy guy. I do not have a lot of use for Premier, but at the Educational Bundle price I might give it a try to compare with Final Cut Express and iMovie. To be honest, 99% of what I do is in iMovie. The problem is that I can get elements for $60, and then need to get Illustrator. I can get the educational bundle of Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop, and In-Design for about $300.

 

[newdeal]

...

adobe is on a slippery slope, they will continue to decrease in value until the point where noone uses most of their products and then apple buys them and releases photoshop as another pro app.

 

[pcharles]

Are you guys even reading the article ? Where does it even say things like that ?

C'mon, why on earth would anyone want to read what the Adobe CEO has to say?

 

[JAT]

I guess Narayen isn't a journalist. Cause then he'd probably know that "muted" just isn't the proper word, here.

 

[jebbe]

Apparently you guys who are having that many problems with Adobes software are in a minority. Cause I've been using it for around 8 years now, ranging from the old GoLive(which was terrible, I can admit that but it's gone now) to the newest Illustrator and Photoshop CS5. I've used almost every Photoshop since Photoshop 5 and never had any major issues that couldn't be solved.

Most of the alternatives to their more widely used software are just no good. I've used GIMP and various other Photoshop alternatives and I was happy to go back to Adobe. All there software runs smooth, and typically always has. The only time it hasn't for me has been due to hardware issues and that's not Adobes fault.

 

[stockli]

Adobe has far more problems than the iOS battle... As many others on this thread have said, their revenue is getting hammered because there just isn't much reason to upgrade anymore. With improved browsers many of the use-cases for Flash have gone up in smoke, and there haven't been many material improvements to the rest of their products either. They are running into the same problem that Microsoft has with Office... 95% of people use 5% of the features, and that 5% feature-set has been around for 10 years. Why upgrade? My firm has a few seats of CS4, and we decided to not upgrade either. Not because of the economy (it hasn't affected us at all), but just because there's no value in the upgrade and it's absolutely ludicrously expensive.

My biggest concern is that the Flash iOS dev abilities will just contribute to the glut of useless apps in the store. Now that there's effectively no barrier to entry there is going to be a lot more garbage in there than currently, which is already pretty bad. I am glad that Unity will be allowed, though, as that will open up a lot of gaming opportunities that would otherwise be extremely expensive to develop.

 

[firewood]

Standard Apple Tactics

This is a result of standard Apple tactics.

When the Mac 128k first came out, it had no cursor keys. This was to massively discourage developers from writing non-GUI apps, like they were still doing for PCDOS. After the majority of developers got beat up by Apple and learned how to write proper GUI apps, newer Macs got cursor keys back, like they do now.

There are now very few relic developers left who still write non-GUI Mac apps that are only usable in the Mac (or X11) Terminal.

Most users don't use or want these apps anyway.

So now Apple introduced iPhone OS and doesn't allow any non OOP native development. After the majority of 45k+ developers got arm twisted and mugged into writing responsive, battery efficient apps using Objective C and Cocoa Touch (and some of the better game development engines), Apple will now allow other development options for apps.

But if these new apps prove less responsive or drain the battery, few users will want them. And Apple has created a community (the majority of 45K+ developers) who now have the knowledge to out-compete developers who use piggish tools.

Thus part of the reason for the muted effect.

There's noise in the forums, but most of the developers making enough money to pay for expensive tools (that haven't already purchased) have better ways to make apps. Even if Apple had to beat them into learning.

 

[840quadra]

I normally don't normally post this kind of feedback, but I am starting to wish all Adobe Flash related articles were relegated to Page 2. Though, I know many do want flash (or more so flash related applications) on their iPhones, so I guess it is important to some.

 

[wdean]

I am sure that a converted Flash app would suck on the iPhone

As with any such packagers, recompilers, etc, they only work in the most basic of cases and just fail on any app that does more that provide some set of links that you click on. For laughs, just try running Pandora through one and witness the fail.

 

[69650]

Since Adobe acquired Macromedia there seems to be limited real competition at the Pro end of the market.

Maybe Apple could buy Adobe, strip out the deadwood, scrap flash, update/improve the other applications and run it as a separate business like they do with FileMaker?