At Microsoft, Bruce gets some sense of Microsoft culture. At Claris, he met the best leaders he has ever met Bill Campbell. At Adobe, Bruce balanced it to become a great company to work for and a company that is performance driven and result oriented (early day Adobe was 'fuzzy').
Bruce emphasized taking a step back and restating their values. He thinks every CEO will agree with it's much easier to make change when the company is in crisis mode.
Acrobat platform was built so that tools and other enterprise software could make a lot of money. Photoshop is really a platform too. Flash was critical to Adobe and therefore they spent 3.1 billion to buy Macromedia. Omniture's acquisition is also because of leveraging the flash component.
A question asked: Will Google docs make pdf obsolete? Bruce suspects yes and says it's up to Adobe to figure out the file format (he open sourced it).
Much of the open source initiatives are innovations on top of what a commercial company has already created, Bruce comments. Bruce thinks it's interesting to watch what's happening in the browser space and he guesses one of the two: Chrome vs. Firefox will dominate browser space. Also watch out for HTML 5 and Silverlight.
Strategic review: where are the cash cows, where are the potential homeruns; teams couldn't understand why resources are poured into other products that are loosing money (it's down to the management team to keep those projects from pre-mature deaths).
Once you have data, you go with intuition (great quote...). Need to be humble enough once you made a stupid decision (The Kinkos deal).
It's hard to make money on consumer software. Adobe will continue to play the consumer space as a defense play from competitors.
Do you cripple your own product? No. Need to target marketing messages carefully. This is regarding Photoshop vs photoshop elements.
Bill Campbell advice: Never compromise your integrity. What's the right thing? Is it for the company's long term benefit?
Engage all level of the company.
Don't live in an artificial world (story of Bill Gates not knowing PDF has taken over the file format because Microsoft is all using Microsoft office file format)
Anytime you compete with free, it's really hard. Spend a lot of time with customer to understand why they select one product over the other.
The leader must be intimately involved with the product, technology and the customers otherwise you can't make the right decisions.
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