King of graphics making formal entry into Indonesia

King of graphics making formal entry into Indonesia

Zatni Arbi, Contributor, zatni@cbn.net.id

Come to think about it, it is quite amazing that a company with only 4,000 people can set a bunch of industry standards in the computer graphics world.

The San Jose-based Adobe Systems Inc. has done it, for sure.

Who has not heard of the software program called Photoshop? It has been the de facto standard in the area of image and photo editing. You do not deserve to be called a professional image editor or graphics designer if you are not using Photoshop.

And, if you use your computer regularly, chances are you are familiar with Adobe Acrobat Reader. A free software utility that you can download from the Internet, it is what you need to read any electronic document with the .PDF extension at the end of its name. Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF) to enable us to share electronic document files that we cannot modify -- if we are not authorized to do so.

Going back further in history, one will recall ATM (Adobe Type Manager). This was the utility that we had to use to incorporate scalable fonts into Windows in order to achieve WYSIWIG ("What You See Is What You Get"). Now that Windows uses TrueType fonts, WYSIWYG is taken for granted and we no longer need ATM. Nonetheless, in the early 1990s, prior to the arrival of TrueType, ATM was another advance from Adobe.

The company also seems to have the tradition of swallowing up its competitors, although not many people have seen it that way. The company lets the acquired competing products live for some time and then kills them altogether.

The acquisition of Aldus was a case in point. Back in the 1990s, I did a lot of desktop publishing using PageMaker. I spent hundreds of hours learning to use the page layout program, which was originally a product of Aldus. Adobe then bought Aldus. Today, PageMaker no longer exists. In its place Adobe has InDesign. The same fate happened to Aldus Freehand, a powerful vector graphics creation and editing program that was left to die after the acquisition and then replaced by the incumbent Adobe Illustrator.

Today Adobe is in the process of acquiring Macromedia. This time around, however, if the acquisition goes through, we can expect more powerful design technology to emerge that can make electronic communication even more stunning.

Adobe has to clear a lot of legal barriers before this can happen, however, because it will certainly create a monopoly in the graphics industry.

The good news for our graphics designers came last July 27. Adobe announced that it had appointed Tech Pacific Indo Informatika as its first distributor here in Indonesia. The appointment marked the company's official entry into Indonesia, where its software products -- especially Photoshop -- have been pirated and used extensively, even by graphics and image professionals.

A Platform Player

At the announcement, Adobe also launched its Creative Suite 2 in Indonesia. Like Microsoft Office, Creative Suite represents a bundling of software programs that are closely integrated with one another.

Two Creative Suite 2.0 offerings are available -- the Standard and the Premium versions. The US$899 Standard version consists of Photoshop CS2, InDesign CS2, Illustrator CS2, Version Cue CS2, Adobe Bridge and Adobe Stock Photos. Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and GoLive CS2 are thrown into the Premium version, which fetches a list price of $1,199.

We still can buy the stand-alone Photoshop, although the name will be Photoshop CS2. We will no longer see the conventional version-number, such as Adobe Photoshop 9.0 or 10.

Instead, we will see Photoshop CS3, CS4 and so on. Raymond Lee, Adobe's Group Manager for South East Asia, explained during the launch that the use of CS actually indicated that his company did not consider itself a software company. "We are now a platform company," he said.

By providing a suite for creative works, Adobe has created a platform that enables integration between the components.

Adobe has three segments of users in mind -- enterprise, professionals and video enthusiasts. Companies in the enterprise segment, especially those in the finance, services and insurance businesses, have their own requirements, which usually center on the communication of reports, etc.

The professionals are those who use the software to produce creative works, including ads, brochures and other marketing collateral. The enthusiasts are the consumers who want to play around with the images and videos that they have captured using their own digital or video cameras.

What I found more impressive is how Adobe has kept up with the trends. In the 1980s, desktop publishing was booming. In the 1990s, the focus of design activities was the Web. Today, the emphasis is on mobile and network publishing. In each era, this company has always offered the tools and features needed to make the task of publishing easier and more manageable.

Mac users have to be careful, though, because the new suite works only on Mac OS X. On the other hand, Adobe has developed Photoshop for Linux and Acrobat for Linux for those who choose the Open Source platform.

Undeterred by Piracy

I liked a statement made by Raymond Lee: "If you make money using our software, then you must pay us," he said. That was a very simple, fair and also realistic approach to software licensing. "You use it for hobby, we won't bother so much," he added, with a smile.

This is a very down-to-earth approach to a market like ours, where software piracy is still ranked one of the highest in the world.

Along with the announcement of Creative Suite 2.0, Adobe has also introduced Adobe Acrobat 7.0. It offers a lot of new features that focus on the creation of intelligent documents. A 30-day Trial Version was distributed during the press conference (you can also download the files from www.adobe.com). I plan to run it and see for myself how powerful and useful those new features are.