I think if Adobe does not change it's roadmap, their existance may be limited and wane off also. Acrobat is expensive and there are many alternatives, some people don't like what they done to the old Macromedia products and are turning to other alternatives.
I think the only thing really going for adobe is photoshop right now. but can they they survive with only one real product? and as soon as a "better-than-photoshop" comes along, then those sales will go down too.
And where is this "better-than-photoshop" product? We're on version 12.0 now and still
nothing in terms of real competition. And once something dominates the way Photoshop does, merely offering a 'better' alternative won't suffice. Pretty much everything was better than Internet Explorer 6, but it took ages to even make a dent in the market share. And with 4-5 as good or better alternatives, IE is still #1 by so far it's not even funny.
Time for a reality check here. Ever since Steve said no to Flash on i-devices, imagination has run rampant and a few weeks later some people are now apparently imagining Adobe as this small, struggling software midget on a life-support machine, or at least on its last legs. How do you go from Apple vs. Flash to this hallucination...?
In reality, we're talking about a company that sees nearly a billion dollars of revenue every quarter, and their latest earnings report exceeded all expectations and sent the stock sky high. And that was before CS5 had been released, let alone announced. They have Photoshop (no competition), Illustrator (no competition), Acrobat (some competition but still a strong performing product), Dreamweaver, After Effects, Premiere and Flash.
Even if the whole world were to stop using the Flash plug-in tomorrow, Adobe is still in an excellent position for becoming the #1 provider of HTML5/Canvas authoring tools, when that day comes. The last time Adobe failed (with their SVG format, an alternative to Flash), they effing bought the competitor that beat them and made Flash theirs. They're not going anywhere.
I've seen a lot of ridiculous things in my time, but an anti-Adobe Apple community really takes the cake. It's like starting up the Anti-American Club of Normandy, France. Mac wouldn't even exist if it hadn't been the #1 platform for creative professionals during the dark mid 90's when they were the only ones still buying Mac, and guess which software they used.
