Adobe as a company faces tremendous challenges in both its culture and its business. The core business, Creative Suites, seems to have eroded somewhat in the last few years, and no clear vision has arisen to take its place. Instead the company has resorted to brutal cost cutting measures, while making very few real changes in its internal culture or its business model.
The peanut butter analogy that was so famously applied to Yahoo years ago applies equally to Adobe today. The only real difference between the companies seems to be the monopolistic lock that Adobe has on its highly profitable but aging core businesses. But that doesn't make the company immune to the erosion of its culture or its values, and ultimately, its stock price.
And the culture that I described above as having so many positive attributes, I'm sorry to say, is the cause of Adobe's downfall. The management structure is byzantine. In my business, real communication up the chain was non-existent. Largely this is because the company adopted rigid processes for software development that silo people away from one another. The notion of a bunch of smart people sweating it out in a room with a whiteboard, trying cool stuff, and then putting in the pain and tears and blood to make a new product is largely non-existent there. It's been replaced by bulleted lists, emails, calendars, and a low level of scrutiny into the day-to-day work habits and abilities of individuals. Getting along matters the most at Adobe; its collaborative culture encourages not making waves. Just work with the process, get things done, and you're secure. Cash in your stock, and move on to the next project. Take a nice vacation if you're feeling a little burned out.
This kind of job cannot exist for very long in the tech industry. The proof is in the pudding. At Adobe there is a furious pace of offshoring and layoffs. Yet the culture doesn't change. People still while away hours in unproductive, mind-numbing meetings. Managers don't communicate with individuals except via email or rigidly scheduled and over-produced "all hands" meetings.
Of course I am describing my experience in one business at Adobe. But I did have direct experience working with other businesses as well. In my time there i saw inconsistency in how different businesses are managed. Creative Suites and the Platform teams seemed to be pretty tight ships, by comparison, so some of the above may not apply. But even then the management structure and lack of communication created huge delays in product development, as well as the creation of ill-concieved "peanut butter" products that only went halfway in meeting a real market need.
Having said that, I want to touch on what is the most damning fact of Adobe's culture and what should cause most employees there to worry, especially the executive team:
There is simply no common idea of what Adobe is, what it does, and what it will be doing in the future. Here's evidence: the CTO barely has anything to do with Creative Suites, in spite of it being 2/3 of the company's business!
What is Adobe's technology vision? What is its real core mission? What business models will sustain it in the future?
Today it seems to be: release CS5 and pray it outsells CS4. Go half-in on a broad base of satellite products that may or may not be well-conceived. Continue supporting the Flash albatross and AIR. To what end? Revenue growth? Good karma? Who knows? Was buying Omniture, a money-losing business, for a tremendous amount of money a good idea? What core vision did it fit into?
I know it's a Valley cliche, but Adobe really needs a lot of that Vision Thing. And soon. And the culture has to get a lot smaller, and a lot hungrier, for it to act on that vision when it does come along.
