Webinar Wire

Adobe Takes A Hit

Posted by Ken Molay December 5 2008 12:59 AM EST

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The San Jose Mercury News reported that Adobe is cutting 600 jobs (8% of its workforce). The company says their lowered revenues are mostly due to decreased demand for Creative Suite 4 (CS4). Interesting, as I was just looking at that product site the other night and thinking to myself that it is prohibitively expensive (as is a very popular component in the suite... Dreamweaver for HTML editing). I guess I'm not the only consumer with that opinion!

I talked with an "unnamed source" today who is not an Adobe employee, but maintains close insider ties with some of the folks on the Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro team. My contact said s/he was told that Connect Pro seems to be a bright spot in the Adobe lineup and they have aggressive plans to continue development and promotion of the web conferencing software.

So we'll see how the cuts affect the web conferencing part of the business. I'm hoping they'll still have enough developers around to implement some of the fixes I have asked for!

By the way, Adobe is by no means alone in the job cuts department. The Merc mentioned that Silicon Valley companies such as Sun, Applied Materials, Yahoo, and eBay have all announced layoffs recently. And of course the giant 12,000 person layoff at AT&T dwarfs them all!