Staying on top of the creative game

With products such as Photoshop, Flash, and its ubiquitous PDF document format, Adobe Systems Inc. dominates the market for multimedia software. During a recent visit to Boston, Adobe chief executive Bruce Chizen spoke with Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray, discussing the company's fierce rivalry with Microsoft and plans to stay on top.

Q It seems that Adobe's tools are used to create nearly everything in media these days, especially after Adobe acquired Macromedia and its Flash technology in 2005. Was this always part of the plan?

A We always had this belief that we should be creating tools, creating solutions that help our customers express themselves in a reliable, interactive way. The combination of Adobe and Macromedia means that they can do so more today than ever before.

In fact, everything you see, whether it's the type in The Boston Globe, whether it's an animation on the Web, whether it's an image in a newspaper, magazine, or on the Web, whether it's a video, whether it's a logo, there's a high probability that anything you see in your daily lives has been touched by a piece of Adobe software.

Q Now you're rolling a bunch of Adobe and Macromedia products into a big new offering to be called Creative Suite 3.

A What we're really talking about are the products targeted for creative professionals, or people who aspire to have the same solutions as creative professionals. We're taking many of the Adobe products, like Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign, the Adobe video products like Premiere and After Effects and others, and we've taken the former Macromedia products, and for the first time we're integrating all of those solutions, making our users' lives much more efficient and productive.

All in all, it'll be about 14 new, upgraded applications, across platforms. It will be, I believe, the largest release ever in the history of desktop software.

Q Sounds like it'll be far too expensive and complex for amateur creative types.

A The products will range probably from less than $1,000 for a series of solutions, all the way through to above $2,000. And of course, we'll continue to make available the stand-alone products like Photoshop, that can be purchased for less than $700. In some cases, products like Dreamweaver for Web layout, will be less than $500.

Q Do you sell a lot to serious multimedia amateurs -- the"prosumer" market?

A Most of our revenue comes from professionals. There's probably 20 to 30 percent of our revenue that comes from prosumers. They're either buying the lower-end versions of our products, like Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements, or they're buying the expensive creative products because they really want the best.

Q You've made PDF an international standard for documents, and you allow other companies to make PDF software. But when Microsoft tried to add PDF to Windows, you said no. Why?

A They are a declared monopolist -- declared not by Adobe, declared by both the US government and the European Union. We don't want them bifurcating the standard or worse yet, making the standard worse, in favor of their proprietary solution -- called XPS.

By creating PDFs that are substandard or by creating PDFs that don't meet the actual PDF standard, they could end up demonstrating that XPS is a better solution. They are giving away XPS creation free with the operating system, and of course they can make that more reliable than the PDF they end up creating in Microsoft Office, and we don't want that to happen.

The promise is that if you create something in PDF, it can be read, it can be displayed on any computer, on any operating system, including a lot of mobile devices today. I don't want that promise to ever change. Microsoft, because of their monopoly position, does have the ability to change that over time, and we don't want them to do that.

Q Your Adobe Reader program for reading PDF files is far slower than many rival PDF programs. Will you ever fix this?

A The reason that it takes as long as it does is that we want to ensure a high degree of reliability and security in every PDF that gets opened. People use PDF because they want a high degree of fidelity and security and we help to ensure that through a reliable reader.

Q But click a PDF file on an Apple Macintosh computer and it opens almost instantly. Isn't that better than using Adobe's reader?

A If people want more capability -- if they want the ability to incorporate digital signatures, if they want the capability to fill out forms, like IRS tax forms -- they're going to need to take advantage of the free Adobe Reader, versus just what comes with the Apple operating system.