Interesting article today in the Silicon Valley Insider: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-underlying-story-behind-adobes-failed-mobile-strategy-2010-4
It's nominally about Adobe's mobile strategy, but applies to the entire corporate culture and how it has changed. I really miss Doc Warnock... whose personal love of Frame was why Adobe bought it. I wish he'd come back, like Toyoda did, to save his company from The Next Generation. I've been hearing some of the same things via the grapevine that the columnist has. This is a key paragraph: But within the past few years, Adobe's focus shifted from being at the top of its class solely to growing its bottom line. Cost-cutting became the company's priority as each year brought no less than 10% in staff cuts. Naturally, the engineering teams became demoralized as they knew every Q4, after they shipped the product they were working on and after putting in long hours, their jobs could be shipped out as well. The executive team's quality-killing concentration on profits started adversely affecting not only the products that made Adobe what it is today, but also its design strategy and adaptability to the changing industry. I'm not Adobe-bashing here. But if they don't wake up to the consequences of their current policies real soon, the downward slide may be irreversible. Paging Doctor Warnock... -- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc. <jeremy at omsys.com> http://www.omsys.com/
