Category Archives: adobe

adobe, development, mobile, professional, software development

Adobe will charge a royalty for use of “Premium features” in Flash Player

Adobe has announced that from August 1 2012, developers who make use of hardware-accelerated Stage3D in Flash Player, in combination with Domain Memory, will pay a 9% net revenue share as royalty. Net revenue is what remains after taxes, payment processing fees and “social network platform fees” (sounds like Facebook) are deducted.

“Domain Memory” is a block of memory declared as a byte array that is used as memory by the Alchemy C/C++ to ActionScript compiler. Allocating some bytes from this byte array is much faster than asking the Flash Player to grab some real memory from the system for your new object or variable, and manipulating memory via this technique is quicker too. In other words, it is a hack to improve performance.

Adobe is aiming the new licensing arrangement at games developers. Most developers will not be affected because of the following:

  • A license is only needed if both Stage3D hardware acceleration and Domain Memory are used. Use just one of these and you are fine.
  • If the game or app is packaged using Adobe AIR for iOS, Android, Windows or Mac (in other words, anywhere) then no license is needed.
  • Applications that make less than $50,000 in revenues (not clear whether this is net or gross) will be royalty-free
  • Applications released before July 31 2012 will remain royalty-free

There may be a program fee however, which I imagine will apply whether or not you pay royalties.

Although the new royalty is not all that onerous, it is significant as a change of direction. Until now, the deal with all these runtimes – Flash Player, Silverlight, Java – is that you might pay for the tools, but the runtime is free.

If you are considering Flash versus other runtimes for your new project, Adobe has now informed you that future free use of the runtime is not a foregone conclusion. Who knows what Adobe will define as “premium features” that might require royalties in future?

According to the FAQ, further premium features are indeed planned:

We are already planning premium features that enable "instant play" gaming experiences for content that relies on large assets which will be able to cache data using a local storage API. For content publishers looking for better branding and user acquisition, another planned new feature would allow apps to request if the user would like to create a shortcut on the desktop, task bar or start menu pointing to the application.

Overall it seems a curious move, at a time when Adobe seems to be moving away from Flash and towards HTML5 as its long-term strategy. The company may profit a little from a few high-profile games, but the dampening effect on Flash usage in the long term will offset any advantage.

No developer likes to pay runtime royalties and I would guess that Adobe’s move will spark an immediate search for alternatives.

Update: there is a great discussion of the issue with participation from Adobe’s Thibault Imbert here. Why the change in direction, when Adobe has previously made money from its tools:

at some point you are capped. Ask any tooling company today, hence why you see companies going to consumers, services, because games could generate millions of revenue with maybe 200 copies of Flash Builder and Flash Pro sold. Is it a good business? Not really.

says Imbert. Another issue is that third-party tools for Flash have been taking market share away from Adobe, which must hurt:

The model where Adobe invests all of the resources in developing the Flash Player, and then projects such as Haxe and Unity pull developers away from Adobe tooling is one that was not sustainable under the old model. Under the new model, it doesnt matter which tools and technologies you are using to develop Flash content, since revenue is generated based on the runtime and not tooling.

says Adobe’s Mike Chambers.

adobe, mobile, professional, software development

PhoneGap is Adobe, Cordova is Apache

The hot cross-platform mobile toolkit PhoneGap was created by Nitobi, a company acquired by Adobe last year. Almost at the same time, the project was submitted to Apache as an open source project. However, the Apache project is not called PhoneGap; it was briefly known as Callback and is now called Cordova (the name of the street in Vancouver where Nitobi was based).

A new official log post explains why PhoneGap was renamed at Apache, but also makes the point that the PhoneGap brand will continue.

PhoneGap is a distribution of Apache Cordova. You can think of Apache Cordova as the engine that powers PhoneGap, similar to how WebKit is the engine that powers Chrome or Safari. (Browser geeks, please allow me the affordance of this analogy and I’ll buy you a beer later.)

Over time, the PhoneGap distribution may contain additional tools that tie into other Adobe services, which would not be appropriate for an Apache project. For example, PhoneGap Build and Adobe Shadow together make a whole lot of strategic sense. PhoneGap will always remain free, open source software and will always be a free distribution of Apache Cordova.

Read it carefully, because it is still potentially confusing. Note that PhoneGap “will always remain free, open source software” though it may gain hooks into commercial Adobe tools. At least, that is how I read it.

I would also expect that Adobe will come up with design and development tools for which PhoneGap (or Cordova) is invisible to the user. You will just be able to build for multiple platforms.

The post adds:

Currently, the only difference is in the name of the download package and will remain so for some time.

I will add that there is great brand-awareness of PhoneGap and what it is, and little for Cordova, so if you want to be understood talk about PhoneGap.

adobe, agile, cloud computing, development, professional, software development, Web, web authoring

Sold out QCon kicks off in London: big data, mobile, cloud, HTML 5

QCon London has just started in London, and I’m interested to see that it is both bigger than last year and also sold out. I should not be surprised, because it is usually the best conference I attend all year, being vendor-neutral (though with an Agile bias), wide-ranging and always thought-provoking.

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A few more observations. One reason I attend is to watch industry trends, which are meaningful here because the agenda is driven by what currently concerns developers and software architects. Interesting then to see an entire track on cross-platform mobile, though one that is largely focused on HTML 5. In fact, mobile and cloud between them dominate here, with other tracks covering cloud architecture, big data, highly available systems, platform as a service, HTML 5 and JavaScript and more.

I also noticed that Abobe’s Christophe Coenraets is here this year as he was in 2011 – only this year he is talking not about Flex or AIR, but HTML, JavaScript and PhoneGap.

adobe, flash, professional

Adobe’s Flex roadmap: another go at positioning Flex and Flash versus HTML5

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Adobe has published a Flex Roadmap which I guess is one of those “Let’s end the speculation” pieces which nevertheless still leaves you with questions.

Flex is the XML-based language for coding applications for the Flash player or runtime. Doubts about Adobe’s long-term strategy for Flex appeared last November when Adobe announced a shift in its business strategy towards digital media and marketing as opposed to enterprise solutions. In addition, Adobe stated that:

In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development. We also know that, currently, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles

I imagine that this has made it difficult for Adobe’s partners to market Flex-based solutions, a problem that this new roadmap tries to address. It begins in forthright style, almost contradicting the earlier statement:

Adobe believes that Flex is the best solution for enterprise and data-centric application development today, and that moving Flex into a community-driven open source project ensures the continued development and success of Flex for years to come.

The paper goes on to iterate the benefits of Flex development, including what is perhaps the most important:

Flex offers complete feature-level consistency across multiple platforms, browsers, and devices

Before you say it, this can include Apple iOS thanks to the packager for iOS which wraps the Flash runtime with your app as a single native app. Mobile support for AIR (but not the Flash player) will continue on “current and future devices and OS updates including iOS 5, iPhone 5, iPad 3, and Android 4.” AIR is the runtime packager which lets you run Flash applications as if they were native apps. As for BlackBerry, Adobe says that RIM plans to continue supporting it, making it sound as if Adobe is not taking responsibility for it.

It gets worse though. What are the implications of Adobe handing over Flex to the Apache Foundation? Fewer Adobe engineers is one:

While under this new model Adobe will provide fewer engineering resources than in the past, we are working with the Flex developer community to increase the total number of active contributors and resources

That said, there will be a team of full-time Flex SDK engineers from Adobe working on the Apache Flex project. Adobe will also contribute BlazeDS (fast messaging and server-side remoting between Flex clients and Java application servers), as well as the forthcoming Falcon 1 compiler and the experimental Falcon JS which compiles ActionScript to JavaScript. Adobe will not contribute LiveCycle Data Services or LiveCycle Collaboration Services, nor will AIR for Linux be revived.

The further down the document you get, the more complications appear. Adobe promises continued support for the current Flex 4.6 SDK in future Flash players for five years, but support for Apache Flex SDKs is not Adobe’s responsibility:

While Adobe will ensure that the Adobe Flex SDK 4.6 and prior will be supported in future versions of Flash Player and AIR, it will be the responsibility of the Apache Flex Project to test future versions of the Apache Flex SDK against released Adobe runtimes to ensure compatibility and proper functioning.

Another little downer is that since Adobe cannot sign Apache-created Flex shared libraries, they will not be cached globally by the Flash player, but only per domain.

Adobe also notes that:

Flash Platform technology will continue to evolve with a focus on gaming and premium video.

which maybe is not what a Flex developer wants to read.

Then there is the tooling, and the paper confirms that Flash Catalyst is discontinued, and that Design View and Data Centric Development tools will be removed from Flash Builder, even including updated 4.x versions. Adobe says this is “In order to better support future Apache-derived Flex SDKs.”

One last point of interest: regarding Flash Player and AIR for Windows 8, Adobe says:

For information on support in future operating systems, please refer to the Flash Player Roadmap White Paper, which will be published shortly.

I guess what we are waiting to hear is whether and when Adobe might support the new Windows Runtime with AIR and the Flash Captive Runtime, since the Flash plug-in will not work on the Metro browser in Windows 8.

So what is Adobe really saying, and what is the future for Flex development? It is all very well saying now, three months after signalling a shift to HTML5, that Flex is still a great platform, but the tangible facts are these. First, Adobe is investing less than before in Flex. Second, Flex will be with Apache and it is up to that nebulous thing the community to determine what happens to it.

The problem is that the future of Flex is wedded to the future of Flash, and the general belief is that Flash is gradually giving way to HTML5, and AIR giving way either to native code or to HTML and JavaScript packaged as an app via PhoneGap or similar.

Kudos to Adobe for spelling out more clearly what is happening to Flex and AIR; but my sense is that the platform will still decline.

adobe, mobile, software development

On BlackBerry 10, Cascades UI and Adobe AIR

I spoke to Jeff Lejeune, RIM’s Advanced User Interface Director, here at BlackBerry DevCon Europe in Amsterdam.

He is part of the team responsible for the Cascades UI, a native code UI framework for the forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS. One of the things he told me is that the Cascades name is actually being used for parts of the API beyond the user interface. It is a major part of the new operating system.

I had not appreciated until today the extent of the likely difference between BlackBerry 10 and the current Tablet OS 1.0 or Playbook OS 2.0. Since the PlayBook OS is already based on QNX, I had assumed that BlackBerry 10 would be an incremental update rather than a radical new direction.

Certainly there is less difference between PlayBook OS 2.0 and BlackBerry 10 then there is between BlackBerry 7.0 and the PlayBook OS, so my assumption was not completely wrong. That said, the introduction of the Cascades UI acquired with The Astonishing Tribe is a major change. Lejune told me that Cascades UI will be in effect the native UI of BlackBerry 10, and the built-in apps will use it.

The first version of the PlayBook uses both native code and Adobe AIR for its built-in apps.

RIM has given full backing to Adobe AIR at this event, presenting it as one of the supported development platforms and saying that it will support AIR for as long as Adobe does and maybe even longer. Even so, it would be fair to say that RIM is moving away from AIR and towards native code and Cascades UI in BlackBerry 10.

Further, Adobe itself has changed direction since the launch of the PlayBook last year. Adobe has made it clear that while Flash, Flex and AIR are still important, its strategic direction is HTML 5 when it comes to development platforms. Some aspects of Flex, the code-based approach to AIR authoring, are being wound down, including the visual designer in Flash Builder.

My sense therefore is that AIR is not the best choice if you are considering how to develop for BlackBerry 10 – and BlackBerry 10 is the future of RIM’s platform. The primary choice should be between Cascades UI, for best performance and integration, or WebWorks (PhoneGap), for development in HTML and JavaScript and cross-platform code.

adobe, professional

Adobe sheds more light on its LiveCycle plans–but what is happening to its Digital Enterprise Platform?

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When Adobe announced a shift in its business strategy in November, it was not clear what the implications were for the products that were no longer favoured. Since then bits of information have dripped out, presumably as the company itself works out its priorities. In December developers learned that Flash Catalyst would be discontinued and Flash Builder would have features removed. Now VP Arun Anantharaman has posted about what is happening to LiveCycle, the Enterprise Services side of Adobe.

Quick summary: Anantharaman says that the following “core offerings” will be the subject of continuing investment:

  • Modules: Reader Extensions, Forms, Output, Digital Signatures, Rights Management, Process Management, PDF Generation
  • Tools: Workbench, Designer
  • Solutions: Correspondence Management
  • ECM Connectors: SharePoint, IBM Filenet, Documentum
  • Advanced Offerings: Data Services

While it is reassuring to see that Data Services will not be abandoned, and that the most important PDF-based server products still have a future, not everything is clear regarding Adobe’s enterprise strategy. It is telling that Anantharaman’s post is entitled “The Future of LiveCycle”; yet the LiveCycle product page still says that LiveCycle has been replaced by the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform:

The next evolution of LiveCycle is here. The new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) brings together core LiveCycle capabilities and much more.

So why not a post on the future of ADEP? If you look at the FAQ about ADEP it seems that many of the modules mentioned above have been replaced by ADEP services.

It would also be helpful to spell out exactly what is being dropped, rather than leaving customers to work this out by spotting what is not mentioned. It does appear that the work Adobe has done on composite applications (“Mosaic”) is a casualty. Collaboration services are another obvious omission. Correspondence seems to be the sole survivor from what was three Solutions Accelerators: the other two were “Review and Approval” and “Interactive Statements”.

There is also the question of what is happening with Adobe’s Enterprise Content Management story. In October 2010, Adobe completed its acquisition of Day Software, thereby acquiring REST pioneer Roy Fielding as well as Day’s core product, CQ (Communiqué). ADEP seemed to bring together the CRX content repository which is used by CQ with Adobe’s previous investment in Enterprise application development, as well including the PDF document services that go back many years at Adobe, before the Macromedia acquisition.

Now, Web Content Management is still a focus at Adobe, being part of what Adobe, with its love of the Experience word, calls Web Experience Management. This is from Anantharaman’s statement last November:

we are now planning to focus our Enterprise efforts on products targeting the digital marketer, including the Digital Marketing Suite and Web Experience Management solution.

That suggests CQ and CRX are alive and well at Adobe; but what exactly is happening to ADEP?

I have asked Adobe for clarification of its Enterprise strategy, and while nobody was available to speak to me on the subject immediately, I have been told that this should be possible in a couple of weeks time, so watch this space.

adobe, design, development, professional, software development, Web

Adobe: why the big business shift when financial results look so good?

Adobe released its quarterly and full year results last week; I am catching up with this now after a week in China.

The company is doing well. Revenue is up by 11% year on year and it generated $1.5 billion in cash. It is buying back shares, usually a sign that a company has more money than it knows what to do with.

Here is the comparison with the equivalent quarter last year:

  Q4 2010 Q4 2011
Creative and interactive 404.8 437.2
Digital Media 165.9 186.4
Digital Enterprise 273.3 342.4
Omniture 109.0 131.1
Print and publishing 55 55.1

In other words, all business segments grew – impressive in uncertain economic times. See this earlier post for a rough breakdown of the segments.

A couple of observations. First, Adobe is benefiting from the big trend in IT towards web, cloud and device. Many companies regard apps (as in mobile apps) as vehicles for marketing, and Adobe’s tools are a natural fit, with or without Flash. We are in a more design-centric IT world than was the case a few years back, driven by Apple, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and just because we can: technology now performs basic computing functions with ease so design becomes the key differentiator.

Adobe is nevertheless remarkable in the way it has managed the transition from print to digital. Few companies manage that kind of fundamental shift in their market successfully.

The other point that interests me is why Adobe announced a major change in its business model in November. Digital media and marketing will be the focus, while it winds down its enterprise development platform, as well as moving away from Flash and focusing on HTML5 for delivery.

Unless the announced figures disguise future problems that are only visible on the inside, this move was driven by bad results. Digital Enterprise, which includes the middleware business, increased revenue by 25% over the same quarter last year.

In 2012 the Digital Enterprise segment is being renamed Digital Marketing Solutions, expressing the company’s intent.

Adobe’s change of direction caught me by surprise, as it was not really flagged at the MAX conference the previous month, though there was evidence of struggle with regard to Flash versus HTML5.

I would describe Adobe’s moves as bold. Taking action ahead of when it becomes inevitable is a good thing, but there are significant risks. Adobe’s platform is all about synergies, and chopping off bits that still have a significant following may have unexpected consequences.

Another curious facet of Adobe’s move is that its normally excellent PR department has done little, as far as I am aware, to brief the press. Major news concerning what will be donated to Apache, or the discontinuation of Flash Catalyst, has emerged from sporadic reports instead. Normally that is a sign of a company under stress, rather than one which is about to deliver excellent results.

I guess this time next year we will have a clearer picture.

adobe, development, flash, professional, software development, web authoring

Adobe discontinues Flash Catalyst, clarifies Flex and Flash Builder futures

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Adobe has told a group of Flex developers, invited to San Francisco for a special reconciliatory summit following the sudden announcement that Flex is moving to the Apache Foundation, that Flash Catalyst will be discontinued. Developer Fabien Nicollet was there and posts:

CS5.5 version of Catalyst is the latest version of Flash Catalyst. It is compatible with Flex 4.5, but compatibility will not be ensured for future versions.

Flash Builder will also have features removed in future versions. Adobe’s slide talks of:

Removing unpopular and expensive to maintain features: Design View, Data Centric Development (DCD) and Flash Catalyst workflows.

The Monocle profiler, shown at the MAX conference as a sneak peek, “continues as a priority”.

The FalconJS project, to compile Flex to HTML5, will be discontinued, though possibly donated to Apache at a date to be determined.

AIR on Linux will not be given to Apache because it would mean sharing the proprietary Flash Player code. This is bad news in the Apache context.

Nicollet concludes:

Flex still has a bright future for companies who want to build fast and robust applications . Not to mention the people who will have a hard time building complex applications on HTML5, for whom Flex will always be a viable and mature alternative.

That is the optimistic view. What is clear from the summit is that Adobe is greatly reducing its investment. I guess we knew this already; but hearing about how Flash Builder will be cut-down, Catalyst discontinued, and so on, will not improve developer confidence.

A lot depends on the progress of the Apache project. My concern here is that since the Flash player, which is the Flex runtime, remains proprietary, this will dampen enthusiasm in the open source community and limit its ability to innovate around Flex.

adobe, development, open source

Adobe favours HTML over Flex, retreats from its enterprise app platform

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Adobe has stated that Flex, the xml-based language for developing applications that run on the Flash runtime (also known as AIR) will gradually give way to HTML 5:

In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development. We also know that, currently, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles.

The company is also giving the Flex SDK to an open source foundation:

we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi.

though Adobe will continue to contribute to its development. Adobe also states that it will continue to develop the Flash Builder IDE for Flex.

I am surprised by this announcement. I understand Adobe’s reasons for abandoning Flash for mobile devices, but since you can use Flex with the packager for iOS or the captive runtime for other mobile devices, it is not necessary to abandon Flex as well.

But is Adobe abandoning Flex? Not as such; in fact the statement linked above says that Adobe is still “committed to Flex” and “committed to Flash Builder”. The problem though is that there are several clues showing that Flex is in decline and no longer strategic.

First there is the statement about HTML5 versus Flex in the long-term.

Second, Adobe says it is not sure what is happening to the Flex roadmap as discussed recently at the MAX conference in Los Angeles:

The Flex roadmap will be determined by the governing board once it’s been established. We plan to contribute framework features previously highlighted as part of Adobe’s Flex roadmap, into this new project.

Third, the delivery of a project to an open source foundation can be interpreted as a signal that a company wants  to distance itself and lacks commitment to its long-term success. I would not make that argument with respect to PhoneGap, but for Flex I am not so sure.

It may already be too late. Imagine you are an Adobe partner trying to sell a Flex project to your customer. What answer do you have when your customer says, “but isn’t Adobe moving to HTML 5?”

When Adobe made its first announcement about the change in its business model I came up with the phrase more publishing, less programming. That view was further strengthened by CEO Shantanu Narayen’s recent post:

The future of the Internet comes down to content – creating it and monetizing it. This is where our customers rely on Adobe, and it’s what is shaping our strategy moving forward.

I take this then as not only a retreat from Flex, but a retreat from enterprise application development in favour of content creation tools.

Charles Humble at InfoQ has an informative post on this issue here.

adobe, professional

Adobe’s cloud plans: most customers will migrate, pay more, get more

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I’ve been listening to some of the sessions from Adobe’s Financial Analyst meeting in New York City yesterday. Since this event was focused on financials, Adobe talked in detail about how it intends not only to win its customers over to a cloud model, but also to make more revenue from them. I found it fascinating.

First, a little background. Adobe announced its Creative Cloud at the MAX event in Los Angeles last month. I was there, and while it was obvious that the announcement was significant, I did not appreciate until yesterday how profoundly the company is changing its business model.

Adobe has its own take on what cloud computing means. There are no plans for Creative Suite – which bundles products including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and Premier Pro – to become software as a service in the manner of Google Apps or Salesforce.com. Rather, the Creative Cloud is primarily two things:

1. A new purchase model for Creative Suite and associated tablet apps, based on subscription rather than perpetual licencing.

2. A set of cloud-based services which extend the features of the desktop applications. These services include storage of your projects, synchronisation across different desktop PCs and mobile devices, font licensing, digital publishing, analytics, and website building.

There is also a community aspect. I grabbed a screen from one of the presentations, and on the right you can see that the customer has a Twitter-style “followed” and “following” count, as well as status activity reported.

 image

In the main part of the screen, you can see the desktop apps she has installed “on this machine” – implying some link between cloud and local machine – tools “you do not have yet” which can be installed from the cloud, and a set of Android and Apple iOS touch apps also marked “click to install”.

One thing Adobe made clear to its analysts is its intention that all its Creative Suite customers will eventually move to the Creative Cloud, and that the majority of its Creative Suite business will be cloud subscription within 4 years.

Why will you move? Well, Adobe is going to reserve some benefits for subscription customers. During the Q&A at the end of the day, the execs were asked whether Adobe Edge and Muse will be in Creative Suite 6, the next major version. Edge is for designing HTML 5 animations, while Muse is for building web sites without writing code. This is what Senior VP David Wadhwani said:

We’ve announced they will be available in the CS6 timeframe. They will be available as point products, as subscriptions, and in the Creative Cloud. Our current thinking is not that we’ll be adding them to Creative Suite. Creative Cloud is what we believe adds more value to our customers and we want to continue to drive people in that direction.

It is not just adding value to customers though, it is adding value to Adobe as well. Adobe presented figures which spell this out (it was a financial meeting, remember). The example was CS 5.5 Design Premium.

image

This particular suite costs as much as $1,899 today if you buy a perpetual licence, or as little as $399.00 as an upgrade from CS 5 (still a perpetual licence). Adobe has a sliding scale of upgrade prices, which rise according to the age of your current version, though apparently this is changing and you will no longer get upgrade prices more than two versions back (I think this means that CS 4.x versions will not get upgrade pricing for CS 6).

The existence of upgrade prices makes calculating revenue per customer over time rather complex, because it depends how often they upgrade. CS is now on an annual release cycle, and according to Adobe this means the revenue from a perpetual licence customer might be as much as $3,894 over six years, or as little as $1,424 if they are an existing customer who upgrades just once at the beginning of that six year period.

On average, Adobe says, its perpetual licence Creative Suite customers pay $30.00 per month “over all CS suites and geographies”.

By contrast, the Creative Cloud subscription would be either $49 or $69 per month (I am not quite sure what extra you get for the $20) and over 6 years, allowing for some customers to drop out, Adobe reckons it will get $40.00 revenue per month.

In other words, it is projecting that its Creative Suite customers will pay on average 33% more under the new Creative Cloud model, than they do today.

I am not clear how dealer margins affect these figures; but Adobe did say that it will continue to work with its retail channel and partners, so that will continue at some level.

One analyst asked why customers will be willing to pay more than they do at the moment. Here is Wadhwani’s answer:

There’s a lot of new value in the creative cloud. You get all of the desktop tools as they’re ready. You get all of the touch tools. When our creative Suite customers are starting to use tablets they want automatic synchronisation and the ability to use those directly with the desktop tools. That’s one of the functions the creative cloud includes.

There’s a lot more in there around community, there’s a lot more in there around training. We’ve talked about Adobe gurus, people that are recognized names in the community participating and helping our customers with new ideas. We’ve also introduced the idea of some segments of the digital publishing suite and business catalyst and some of our publishing services being available,

And recently we’ve acquired a company called Typekit which addresses one of the biggest issues as people move to being more digital, which is how do they manage and licence fonts? That whole aggregate value is substantially more than what they get with a single version of the creative suite.

Is that worth on average 33% more? It is hard to judge as it depends on the individual customer’s pattern of work.

Whatever you think of this strategy, it is in line with something Adobe has been pushing hard in recent years, which is to drive for recurring revenue rather than one-off purchases. In fact, this is stated in the financial presentation. Apparently, 40% is already recurring revenue, but the company plans to transition the majority of overall Adobe business to recurring revenue within 4 years.