Gearing up for Adobe's CS2

BC: When will Creative Suite 2 be available in SA?

Nick: In the northern hemisphere, autumn is our official commitment to deliver the product, so realistically, by the end of May.

BC: Is Creative Suite 2 a complete revamp, or is it more of an evolution on the previous product?

Nick: I guess it's a bit of both, really. Every single one of the point products are new, so that a new version of PhotoShop Illustrator, GoLive!, InDesign, and Acrobat7 obviously, is new to Creative Suite 2, but has already been previously in 1.3. There was a minor update around Christmas when we shipped Acrobat 7. Each of the products are full, new versions in their own rights. They've all got new features, new functionality, but there's also Version Cue, which is the kind of file management component that was added to Creative Suite 1 which really made the product - that's obviously been updated - but there's a new component technology called Bridge, which is a bit like the old file browser in Photoshop, but now you can use it to preview all of your Adobe content, and also non-Adobe content like work files and stuff like that, and it's a very graphical interface. A few people have commented that it's going to help them move between a Mac and a PC because it gives them a standard view where if they get used to working in that environment they can stay there, and also enabling things like in the dialogue boxes, you can now choose to use the OS dialogue box or the Adobe one, which again helps you to move between the applications and also between platforms because instead of having typical Mac save-cancel type functions you have more Adobe-speak and graphics.

BC: How would people generally use the new Bridge product?

Nick: I guess, realistically, you use it a bit like you would when you're browsing a hard drive normally, in its simplest form, when you double-click on the My Computer or My Mac icon, or whatever, that kind of window that would come up. In its basic form, that's very much how you would compare it, it's like an OS-type dialogue window, but it has more functionality and that so that when you click on an image or a file all the metadata is shown, a preview of the content of the file is shown, you can have Favourites and stuff, so that you can drag stuff into your Favourites page, the places that you always go are always there, and it's just a much quicker way of navigating. Bridge also has an added functionality like the ability to batch process Photoshop files and things like that, and to run some of the more processor intensive stuff that you really don't want to have to open Photoshop because you know that every file in this folder needs to be batch processed to make it smaller, so you can just set Bridge going, tell it to do that batch process, and go off and do something else without having to open Photoshop. You can also set within Bridge your colour profile, so instead of setting colour profiles in Photoshop, then Illustrator, then GoLive! you can just do it once within Bridge and that would set it uniformly across all of the Adobe house, so your work space is a much quicker way to work.

BC: So when you start out in the morning, you arrive at work, you'll probably open up Bridge first?

Mohammed Jogie, Adobe SA PR and Marketing: I think so, I think that's more or less how it's going to start happening.

Nick: And uh, there's one or two other kinds of new things. There's a Help centre, which is in one place, so that instead of going into each application and clicking on Help, so that if trying to understand what to do, you're not very sure, whether it should be Photoshop or Illustrator, you can just go to the Help centre, search on what you're trying to do and it'll tell you which application you should be using and you can search specific help between Illustrator and Photoshop. And, there's one other final component you can access within Bridge that's new, and that's Adobe stock photography - 82% of our quoted customers tell us that they're going to use royalty-free images in the next twelve months, and you either have to manually search all the different photo discs or go to Getty, go to Corbis, and search, so what we've done is provide a new search window within Bridge which enables you to search online photo libraries, and it downloads unwatermarked comps into Bridge, and you just double-click on them and they go straight into Photoshop until it's ready for you to use. Obviously, if you're going to use it commercially you need to go and buy the image, but it at least enables the work to be much quicker.

BC: That's quite an interesting feature. So you set up an account through Adobe and then you can start downloading?

Nick: Yep, you can just do like a search on "Cape Town" and it would go and find you images associated with Cape Town, or whatever you're looking for. You can just simply double-click on the comp and it goes straight into Photoshop - it's there to use. There's another component of it - we're looking to add as many photographers to the list as proper, not your low-end wedding photographer-type people, but more the professional ad agency-type photographers, so they'll be searchable, too, so if you're looking for an architectural-type of photographer in Cape Town... the idea being, as the list gets populated, that you'll be able to do that, and Bridge will give you a list of photographers in your region that shoot that type of picture, so that ad agencies and creatives can go out and get the bespoke image, so we're not about cutting bespoke, one-off imagery out, we're about enabling a lot quicker and easier.

BC: So it seems like Bridge almost views all the apps together.

Nick: Bridge is more the command centre. It enables you to move quickly between the apps to manage your workload.

BC: Now with Creative suite 1, you obviously want a customer to buy the whole suite, because some customers might be focussing on Photoshop and some might be focussing on another product, but you actually want to sell all your products so people benefit from all the products. Have people started buying the whole suite? Have people started taking this offer up?

Nick: Yeah, I mean, Creative Suite 1 has been a phenomenal success, far exceeding all of our expectations. It's a valued proposition offered by all of the products in one box. It has ease of use, the fact that you can move from one product to another seamlessly. There've been many other things, like in the old days if we updated Photoshop, some of the new functionality of the file that you would create in Photoshop wouldn't be accessible in InDesign or Illustrator because they would need to be upgraded as well. A lot of our customers were already buying and upgrading the point products every time, so it's a lot easier for them 'cause it means that when a new feature comes out they can really make use of it straight away because of the applications support that new bit of transparency or whatever it might be, whereas in the old days you'd have to wait for them all to update before you would see the full benefit of the new technology, and that's another driving factor.

BC: With all the individual version numbers, are they also increased by one now?

Nick: Yes, So it's Photoshop CS 2, InDesign CS 2... So they're all on a par and we haven't got 5,6,7 and 10, and 11 and... it's a lot easier for the customer to know that they've got the latest version because they've all got the same number.

Also, you'd think that with brand new versions of everything and Bridge being added that the price would go up, but it's not, it's actually going to come down, so we're realigning the prices everywhere. In South Africa you buy off the US dollar price list and the US dollar street price for Photoshop is going to come down by about 100 dollars, therefore Creative Suite is going to come down as well. It's already cheaper here than it is in London because of the exchange rate, so you will see that price drop.

In the beginning of 2003 we started to trial activation, which is our anti-piracy or compliancy software that was built into the application. We trialed it in Australia on Photoshop on the Windows platform and it was successful, so with the launch of Creative Suite 1 in September 2003 we rolled that out globally. That's gone so well, there's been no complaints about it, that it's actually coming to every product with Creative Suite 2. So there's going to be activation in both Windows and the Mac version. The crucial thing to remember with the way that we handle it, unlike some of our competitors, is that we take the assumption that you as a consumer are trying to be legal, you're trying to be compliant, and that's the way it should be. Because if you've gone out and invested R7000 in a bit of our software we want you to be able to use it straight away. So you can install it straight away and you get thirty days to enable the activation and we're kind of making the bold assumption that, pretty much anywhere in the world these days, you can get online within thirty days, even if you're starting with no connection and have to have a line installed, and ADSL installed, or if you happen to pick up the phone and fax us, you can get activation in thirty days, and really what we are doing is making the assumption that some people buy our products because they are on deadline - something's fallen over, they're away from home, or for whatever reason... they need to walk into a shop, pick up Photoshop, go home and be able to work straight away, and that's what we enable. No personal data is transferred to Adobe during the process. It works like everybody else's, on a hard drive ID. It's pretty intelligent. Even if you do something out of the ordinary, we expect the average person might have a desktop and a laptop, the licence enables you to do that, but only for you to use it at any one time - the licence doesn't allow two people to use the same licence simultaneously.

BC: And on CS 2 do you get an upgrade licence?

Nick: Yes, the route to purchase for CS 2 is that you can either go out and buy a full new version, or you can upgrade from Version 1, and you can also upgrade from Photoshop, so if you've still got Photoshop 7 or Photoshop 8 you can upgrade to CS 2.

BC: Does Adobe have an office-wide package where you can maybe buy five versions?

Nick: Yes, we have two types of licencing available, depending on whether you're government or commercial, or education, but basically it comes down to two distinct types - TLP and CLP. TLP is "transactional licence programme", and that's basically where you would come to us and say you want five or ten copies of Creative Suite and we would put a licence agreement together for that one purchase of ten Creative Suite, and if you wanted another ten that would be another transaction. CLP, which is "contractual licencing programme", works a bit like a loyalty scheme with an airline. Every purchase you've made adds up points, and when you get to the next number of points level you would gain an increased discount.

BC: You've already mentioned Bridge. Going through the other products, which are the really 'wow'-features that you think people will get excited about?

Nick: In InDesign you've got a much more dynamic version of templating. You have the ability to import layered Photoshop and layered pdf files, and switch on and off the layers inside InDesign without affecting the original Photoshop files, so that gives you a lot of power as a layout designer. In Photoshop we've got a feature called "vanishing point" which makes perspective positioning very quick and easy. You've also got one-click red eye removal, non destructive shrinking and enlarging. GoLive! supports mobile PDAs which is pretty cool. There's collaboration security for locking down a pdf and also enabling online or email collaboration.

BC: Keeping at the forefront of software development must be quite challenging. Do you foresee Adobe focussing more on the current programmes or developing new radical diversions?

Nick: I would expect we'll stay at the top for the years to come and we'll be doing whatever we need to do to achieve our goals and remain as number one, and most of that is just not taking anything for granted, so continually looking at what's going on in the market, identifying trends and keeping at the forefront. Where that leads us in terms of having new features or adding new products to the line-up, the market will dictate. I guess if something comes up that's a compelling new feature that is going to revolutionise things, it may be rolled into its own product - we're continually evolving.

BC: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us. Can we just take a couple of pictures now?

Nick: Well, do you have a narrowing lens?

BC: No, but we can always Photoshop them...