April - 2005 issue > On The Cover

By Harish Revanna

Shantanu Narayen, recently appointed President and Chief Operating Officer of Adobe Systems, browses through his emails. “Look at my inbox.

Everything comes into this in PDF (portable document format),” he tells us, grinning enthusiastically at the rate at which the PDFs are percolating the global markets. It’s been more than a decade since PDFs were created and there is still no foreseeable competition.

Fortunately, still Adobe has a larger market to capture—it has 16 million users out of an estimated 60 million.

Last quarter, the company witnessed overwhelming results—with PDFs contributing 42 percent of its $472 million revenue. Bruce Chizen, CEO, verbosely stated his ambition of upping that percentage to 50 by the next quarter. If Chizen’s words translate into reality, then Adobe could possibly brand their name on all digital documents globally.
Intelligent documents, as the company refers to the Acrobat PDF, would make Adobe the monarch in its space.

But predictions are not pronouncement. As opportunity increases the competition will as well. For example, Microsoft may launch software on its Windows operating system that could do the same work as PDF for free. And this could change Adobe’s business. However, Adobe doesn’t seem to subscribe to words like “may be” and “perhaps.” “Our main concern now is promoting PDF awareness to various industries,” says Narayen—obviously hinting at Adobe’s disinterest to brainstorm for lurking competition.

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