Adobe CS3’s size 13 shoe leaves big footprint

With today’s announcement of Creative Suite 3, a massive software suite that now contains 13 applications, Adobe Systems Inc. unquestionably has the biggest footprint in both print and online publishing. The company’s rise to power over the past few years was predictable, but the speed with which is has consolidated its power has been astonishing.

Once a second-rate competitor to Quark Express, Adobe’s flagship InDesign product, tightly integrated with its Photoshop and Illustrator tools in its Creative Suite 2 package, has in just a few years marginalized its once invincible competitor.

In its game of high-stakes Monopoly with Microsoft, Adobe now owns what are arguably the Park Place and Boardwalk of defacto standards for Web and print: PDF and Flash.

It swallowed Web publishing leader Macromedia whole in 2005 and over the past 24 months integrated the tools into Creative Suite, which now includes six different bundles. Even before relaunching the products this quarter, its strategy appears to have paid off. Its earnings report for Q4 2006 showed profitability up 91% on sales of $682 million. It has a $2.8 billion cash war chest and a market cap of $5.2 billion, up from just $1.6 billion in 2004.

Adobe is also not afraid to take on Microsoft, which was forced last summer to remove a popular ‘save to PDF’ capability from Office 2007 after legal threats from Adobe. In many ways, however, Adobe is following in Microsoft’s footsteps. It is a standard bearer for fat client applications. And as Microsoft did with Office, it has used the application suite model to outmaneuver some competitors.

CS3 comes in bundles targeting print, online, or both in a kitchen sink version that puts all 13 applications in a single box (See Adobe overhauls suite for design professionals). While Flash and Dreamweaver have been added to the stable, GoLive is out of the suite (a new version will be marketed as a low-end alternative to Dreamweaver. See The PageMaker-ization of Adobe GoLive). The ultimate bundle, the “Master Collection,” creates a software beast that may just top Office 2007 as the biggest fat client suite on the market. “It’s targeted toward someone who is fearless about technology,” says Caleb Belohlavek, director, creative solutions at Adobe.

I should hope so.

How big is the new Creative Suite? “Most of the products fit into a 2 to 3 GB footprint. That is fairly significant amount of storage, but hard drive space is cheap these days,” Belohlavek explains. For memory Adobe requires just 1 GB but any designer will tell you that the sky's the limit for the more resource hungry applications in this suite.

CS3 may be the ultimate fat client, but Adobe is also trying to figure out what could move to the Web 2.0 world. “We’re starting to think in those terms,” Belohlavek says. Because many of its applications are processor intensive, however, Belohlavek says that it’s not clear how much of the current suite could be Web hosted. “One of the biggest challenges is that there’s an awful lot to look at,” he says.