As a graphic designer I practically live inside Illustrator and I'd solemnly swear with my hand on Photoshop install CDs. I no longer do much motion graphics these days, but After Effects is a terrific piece of software also.

Regarding the Illustrator part -- I wasn't like that, I used to be a Macromedia FreeHand kid. Since version 5.5 (Corel Draw version 2 to 5 was before that). But after -- what, 8 years? -- FreeHand MX came as a huge disappointment, so huge it shattered my brand loyalty, so I packed and moved to the Illustrator camp. Imagine that!

Still, I am not a huge fan of all Adobe products. Illustrator was unusable until the CS release, and it's still slow as hell, Acrobat renders type much worse in version 6 than it did in version 5 and has got an ugly Windows interface even on Mac (how hard can it be to change a bit that GUI in order to look like a real Macintosh program, people?) and InDesign documents are not warmly welcomed at the service bureaus.

Bottom line, except that -- and about a gazillion other complaints -- I am more attached in life to Adobe than to some of my friends. Not that's a good thing.

That's why I followed Dragos' post Adobe's change story over at @rgumente pointing me to Getting Reorganization Right: How Bruce Chizen Drove Change and Innovation at Adobe Systems an interview with Bruce Chizen posted on Knowledge@Wharton web site.

The interview is interesting -- I didn't know about Quark's attempt to take over Adobe in 1998, and I did't know about Acrobat being the most profitable product -- having surpassed Photoshop a couple of years ago. But another thing really took me by surprise: Adobe seeing Microsoft as a competitor.

« We have a whole bunch of "point product" competitors: Quark against InDesign; Corel Draw is still alive against Illustrator; Global Graphics against PostScript; Macromedia Dreamweaver against GoLive. But when I think about competitors, there's only one I really worry about. And it's one that happens to have $35 billion in revenues and $50 billion in the bank. And it happens to be in the software business. Microsoft is the competitor, and it's the one that keeps me up at night.

[...] We have learned, historically, if we stay close to what we really do well, we win. Microsoft has tried [to enter Adobe's markets]. It tried in the early days coming up with a PostScript clone -- and it actually shipped one printer with an OEM. It was a total failure. It tried with Microsoft Draw and Microsoft PhotoDraw, and gave away the product free with Microsoft Office to kind of "nitch up" Illustrator and Photoshop. Again, it was total failure -- these products no longer exist. For eBook publishing, it tried Microsoft Reader, as a end run around PDF. You never hear about Microsoft Reader anymore. Microsoft tried, once again, to go at Photoshop with Microsoft Picture It. The company has never been able to move Picture It above the consumer level. So, I am confident that, as long as we do what we do well, as long as we continue to execute, we'll be very successful, despite Microsoft's monopoly. »

But on the other hand we read about what we already know -- the sheer ubiquity of Adobe's products:

« We truly have made a difference in the world. In the early days our challenge was about taking pretty stuff on a screen and expressing it on paper through PostScript. Then think about our graphics applications; just about any logo you see was probably created with Illustrator. The type you see is probably an Adobe font. The image you see on the web was probably touched by Adobe Photoshop. The title effect you see in a movie was probably enhanced by Adobe After Effects. And just about any important document you see on the web is communicated with PDF and Acrobat. »

It is true. But sadly, this also sounds a bit like a kind of monopoly, doesn't it?