In a lacklustre interview with CNET News staff writer Mike Ricciuti, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen discusses Linux, Adobe's lack of competition, and the penetration of PDF. Usually a very candid interview subject, Chizen sidesteps more than he answers. In fact, so soft are the follow-ups to his answers, that one has to wonder if Ricciuti wrote the questions after the answers.

The responses from readers are far more entertaining than the article, though nothing about the CNET News.com article is informative. The title of the fluffy interview should have been "Adobe Versus The Idiots."

First, the salient points of the interview:

• While noting InfoPath's weak showing against PDF in capturing the enterprise forms market, Chizen took the opportunity to rub salt in Microsoft's Department of Justice-inflicted wound.
• Chizen re-affirmed Adobe's committment to Mac-based customers while also noting that, with Adobe's increased enterprise revenue, Mac-based applications represent a smaller than ever segment of Adobe's profits.
• Adobe doesn't view open source as a threat.
• After the success of three-year old Create PDF Online, which allows subscribers to upload Microsoft Word, WordPerfect, TIFF, and other native format files for conversion by Adobe's servers to PDF, Chizen feels that, when the Internet is ready for server-hosted software applications, Adobe will also be ready.

• Chizen played the Linux question close to the vest, avoiding a direct answer to the question if whether Photoshop or similar creative applications are planned for Linux release. He did reveal that Adobe is watching the market, and if the market moves to Linux, Adobe applications will be there.

Nothing about the interview is surprising. Chizen opened many doors to real information, but Ricciuti's follow-ups never walked through them. With a title as ambitious as "Adobe Versus The World," one would have expected at least one expository thread that wasn't old news. Even just a single hard question would have been nice.

However, if Riccuiti believes the world to be populated by just a couple of intelligent people with valid opinions flanked by a trio of morons, then the title becomes more apt. The reader response to "Adobe Versus The World" is almost worth reading.

Writing psuedononymously as Buzz Lightyear, a self-described system administrator proclaims with typical third-grade flamer grammar that he has "found and been looking for alternatives for Adobe products."

Continues Disney's plastic space-man toy: "Yes that is right. Why because Adobe continues to shun the Mac community by not having a server products for Mac OS. Yes one of the better server setups out there today is an Apple Xserve running Mac OS X Server. Yet Adobe does not have a product that runs in that environment. They would much rather produce a server product for Microsoft Windows XP client than a server product for Mac OS X Server. Don't be fooled by the lack of a Server product Adobe themselves will not produce a server product not because they can not but they will not. I have contacted them time and time again about this and everytime they are not concerned about prodcuing anything for the Mac."

Mr. Lightyear's sage-like authority on the subject becomes instantly evident with his closing remark: "Secondly, most of the Mac applications are lesser products with lesser features and yet Adobe expects me to pay for the developement of Windows only products and features. No that isn't happening and no I will not pay. And that is all I have to say about that."

As any user of both Windows and Mac versions of the same Adobe products knows, the products have near total feature parity. The only differences that exist in Adobe point products are those mandated by differences in the respective operating systems or the other applications into which the products must integrate. For example: Adobe Acrobat 7 under Windows includes integrated scan and OCR functions ("capture"), which are not available under OS X because they rely, in part, on Windows' underlying WIA scanner support; which is not a core component of OS X.

Another software industry genius, Below Meigh, crucifies Adobe to justify his ire at the software industry as a whole. "Will users comply when Adobe mandates that 'all' its applications must connect to Adobe-online to run? We see this with licensing, but when all users of Adobe applications are on high-speed lines, they will use the old convention of Terminal-Mainframe to run applications. You'll have a shell, but the main app will be running at Adobe."

Yes, Meigh, that is something Chizen discussed briefly. He also stated that, when the market is ready for that, Adobe will be as well.

It isn't Adobe pushing the mainframe-thin client scenario; more and more enterprises are demanding server-hosted applications to maintain security, scalability, and versioning control. To wit: Citrix Metaframe, arguably the most embedded server-hosted application sharing system in use today, created the demand; companies like Adobe, Quark, Corel, Microsoft, and so on did not initially support their applications running in such an environment. However, since the market wanted to host Adobe, et al applications on a server running Citrix, the application developers responded by optimizing their products for just such an environment. Adobe did not create the demand, it simply answered it.

As is typical in online discussions, only those who list a real name, like Keith Risler, display any knowledge of their subject or even intelligence about the way they discuss it. Though Risler makes oblique references to the Canadian magazine market, his dissection of the failings in Adobe Reader 7's index feature are right on: "Boolean searches [within compiled] Acrobat-generated indexes seem to return meaningful results only across documents and not [within] a single document."

Agreed, though Reader's internal Find function is designed to search solely within the current document, thus providing separate utility to the index searching feature. If, as Risler points out, Adobe hopes to enable businesses to search PDFs that include the currently open document, they need to integrate the two types of searches. Ideally, they would search in real time, avoiding the need for prior generation of an index.

"I avoid PDF documents whenever possible," says Robert Aitchison, who believes PDF has limited staying power. "Over the years Acrobat has gone from a small, efficient reader application to this massive bloated pig and a bigger hit to productivity than ESPN.com. It's this that will drive people to alternatives, any alternatives."

Someone calling himself Old Warez echoes Aitchison: "If another decent company made a light PDF reader for Windows it would probably be popular. It would be a fast way to put a small programming company on the map."

Obviously Old Warez has not done his homework. Otherwise he would know that such competitors do exist, and that they hold an almost too small to measure share of the PDF viewing market.

Returning to the question of Linux, Shawn Parker believes Adobe should take the initiative in porting its creative point products to Linux rather than waiting for the growth of the operating system to create a demand for applications. "If Adobe ports their flagship software, these small design shops could buy Linux versions and not only benefit from stability, but still save money."

"The bottom line is that the cost of hardware is nill compared to the cost of staffing employees. The cheapest product will be the one people can get work done faster on," agrees Old Warez.