Anyone have Adobe stock?

[BlackEleven]

It plummeted over 20% today. Yikes.

http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/22/tech...n=money_latest

http://www.google.ca/finance?q=ADBE

[sclitheroe]

Adobe can rot in hell as far as I’m concerned. Their products are littered with vulnerabilities, have uneven and inconsistent support across platforms, and they make administrators jump through hoops to try and come up with a workable strategy for keeping a corporate office up to date and consistent.

They gained dominance or de facto status in a number of markets, then simply stopped innovating and have ridden an old and insecure codebase into the ground. Along the way everyone else has had to pay the price; it’s Adobe’s turn now.

[mykalberta]

+1 couldnt happen to a worse company.

[BlackEleven]

Not a big fan of Adobe either.

I've always liked Photoshop. I prefer free, open-source software in most cases, but I still find PS gets better results for me than GIMP.

Reader is a crashy, buggy piece of crap. As someone who works on a lot of different OSes I like the idea of PDFs, but its a shame that a simple viewer is apparently so difficult to create.

Flash is garbage as well. Slow and buggy. Unfortunately there's not much out there to replace it yet (HTML5 included).

[Traditional_Ale]

Photoshop is the only thing they've produced thats any good, imo. They destroyed Dreamweaver and Primiere blows too.

[Frank MetaMusil]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

They gained dominance or de facto status in a number of markets, then simply stopped innovating and have ridden an old and insecure codebase into the ground. Along the way everyone else has had to pay the price; it’s Adobe’s turn now.

Interesting that quite a few analysts agree with this and the numbers don't lie.

So far in its 18 weeks on the market, CS5 sales are tracking behind the 2007 launch of CS3

http://online.barrons.com/article/SB...lenews_barrons

Even with the correction today it's still trading at 14 times expected eps, but like you say, they have gone stale and people are realizing that.

[BlackArcher101]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

They gained dominance or de facto status in a number of markets, then simply stopped innovating and have ridden an old and insecure codebase into the ground. Along the way everyone else has had to pay the price; it’s Adobe’s turn now.

Sort of off-topic, but does anybody else think RIM is heading in this direction? I keep getting people to tell me to invest in RIM, but in my opinion I just don't see the innovation there anymore. More reactive than proactive.

[Barnes]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

Sort of off-topic, but does anybody else think RIM is heading in this direction? I keep getting people to tell me to invest in RIM, but in my opinion I just don't see the innovation there anymore. More reactive than proactive.

Yes and no. They've made it pretty clear with the 2 year old hardware they just released that they have no capability to compete with HTC, Apple, Samsung, Motorola hardware and can't compete with iOS, Android, WP7 or Web OS2. I think they will pick up a lot of the low end former feature phone user market (which is still pretty big) as a cheap Twitter, Facebook, email phone. Think of the BB as the this decades Razor Phone.

Not surprising about Adobe. There upgrade cycle has gotten a little ridiculous lately. It seems like yesterday I was illegally downloading Photoshop 6.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by BlackArcher101

Sort of off-topic, but does anybody else think RIM is heading in this direction? I keep getting people to tell me to invest in RIM, but in my opinion I just don't see the innovation there anymore. More reactive than proactive.

I think that RIM is at the same point more or less. Their hardware is decent, but their OS has been allowed to stagnate. There are a lot of signs pointing to the fact that OS 6 is either the end, or close to the end, of the line for the current OS. BES works well, but its the same story; it’s clunky, difficult software to work with, and its as easy to break as it is rock solid when its working.

It’s not necessarily a death knell for them - you can look at Apple and how they resurrected their software platform with OS X and it’s derivative, iOS, over the last 10 years as a strong indicator that you can radically revamp your codebase and emerge stronger. You can also, though, look at Palm, who rode their legacy OS all the way into the ground as an example of what not to do.

RIM’s advantage is what they have now works well at what it does, there’s no question of that, but it’s clearly not a technology that is forward facing when compared to its colleagues in the marketplace. So they at least have some time, hopefully, to do some solid innovation and R&D to put themselves back in the race.

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by sclitheroe

I think that RIM is at the same point more or less. Their hardware is decent, but their OS has been allowed to stagnate. There are a lot of signs pointing to the fact that OS 6 is either the end, or close to the end, of the line for the current OS. BES works well, but its the same story; it’s clunky, difficult software to work with, and its as easy to break as it is rock solid when its working.

It’s not necessarily a death knell for them - you can look at Apple and how they resurrected their software platform with OS X and it’s derivative, iOS, over the last 10 years as a strong indicator that you can radically revamp your codebase and emerge stronger. You can also, though, look at Palm, who rode their legacy OS all the way into the ground as an example of what not to do.

RIM’s advantage is what they have now works well at what it does, there’s no question of that, but it’s clearly not a technology that is forward facing when compared to its colleagues in the marketplace. So they at least have some time, hopefully, to do some solid innovation and R&D to put themselves back in the race.

Funny, I read something about how American investors have given up on RIM, but Canadian investors still like it.

RIM's best bet would be to figure out a strategy to run their software on top of Android. BES is their best asset, and if they could figure out how to build a secured android phone, they could keep everyone using BES before someone else comes up with something that will compete on the enterprise level.

[bomber317]

A buddy at work purchased Adobe on earnings day, with all signs pointing that were going to beat analysts estimates.

It did... but their forward looking numbers were bad. So he lost 20% overnight, and sold the next morning.

In regards to RIM, I have lots of people ask me about their stock since I owned it in the heyday. I'd have to agree with the general consensus here with little to no growth for their business with the path that they are headed on.

They really need to shake it up for the consumer market to make some noise for shareholders. They will have the corporate numbers for the next couple of years but that doesn't excite the market.