Adobe announced the latest update to its Creative Suite, version 4, or CS4 for short, a week or two before the global credit crisis started to unravel, and has started shipping the new release in the midst of complete and utter market turmoil. In addition to these less then ideal circumstances, CS4 is an upgrade to an already mature and highly feature-laden product collection: CS3, released 18 months ago was so feature-rich that it could take months to get a grasp of all of its capabilities. Worse, the new release has few or none of the “must-have” features that made CS3 a runaway success, such as the native support for Intel-based Macintosh models. So what does Adobe Creative Suite 4 mean for the market?

With the exception of highly vertical software solutions such as CAD software, 3D modeling and rendering or specialized software for film and movie production, the Adobe Creative Suite is the last of the big, power-hungry, feature-driven software packages that still continues to evolve significantly with each release. Unlike Microsoft Office, that has ceased to add vital end-user functionality years ago, the CS environment keeps growing and expanding. This is true for the individual applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, DreamWeaver, Flash, After Effects…), as well as in terms of integration of the overall environment.

So even if CS4 is not quite as anticipated in the market-place as its predecessor, the new Adobe product is significant in several ways. In fact, CS4 underlines some emerging trends in technology and media that might remain unnoticed, and it reminds us that technology evolves in strange and unpredictable ways that both invite and defy simplistic, cooky-cutter classification.

If you are wondering what on earth I am talking about, read on -- and please take note that I am purposely NOT reviewing CS4’s technical capabilities and specifications and their respective merits. There are many technology blogs out there for that purpose. I am trying to get to something else here.

1) The Creative Suite is evolving because the market is evolving

Unlike word-processors and spreadsheets, the applications the are contained in the Creative Suite are basically addressing the needs of a moving target. Media, publishing and communication are currently part of their broadest, most sweeping evolution ever. Who can create, what can be created, and how it will be distributed are all in constant flux. Even looking back as little as five years makes us realize that the displacements that are taking place in media creation and access are not slowing down but accelerating. We are at the center of a perfect storm that will affect every aspect of human communication. It does not, however, mean that seemingly antiquated forms of media such as print are simply going away. We’ll get back to that.

As for the Creative Suite, Adobe has no choice but to evolve and grow if it wants to stay ahead of the market it serves, and given the apparent changes, a new release every 18 month remains perfectly reasonable, even if it is not carried by some stunning killer feature.

Commoditization and amateurism drive a need for excellence

The past few years have been deeply marked by what has been coyly named user-generated content. Blogs, cell-phone videos, amateur photos have seen their popularity explode. In this temporarily liberating cult of the amateur, things had to look badly-done and improvised to be taken seriously, and media producers were scrambling to mine the newly accessible riches of dilettante creativity.

Now I am not suggesting that blogs and YouTube are going away -- on the contrary. User-generated content (for want of a better word) is a reality, a new dimension in our post-digital media cloud, and it drives several trends and counter trends. One of these trends is commoditization of tools: creating a blog; shooting, editing and posting a video; taking and uploading pictures to Flickr or other photo-sharing sites have all become incredibly easy. This commoditization of tools and capabilities is leading to uniformity and consensus-driven appearance of user-generated content, a sort of visual ambient noise that can be quite sophisticated, but rarely ground-breakingly original.

This trend in turn drives an increased need for excellence, and that’s where CS4 comes in. The problem is, the notion of excellence evolves constantly. More than anything else, effective communication is about standing out in a crowd, and that is usually achieved by tools that allow a great degree of individual creativity. The more pervasive blogs and user-generated videos become, the more professionals will need tools that allow them to differentiate themselves from the ambient noise. Since these notions are in constant flux, the tools have to be as well. This is the market Adobe is serving with the Creative Suite, and of course it needs to evolve, even if evolution does not mean the same thing at all times.

Get used to it: Cloud computing will not take over the world

There is an increasingly widespread belief in the technology world that it is only a question of time that all our computing activities will “move to the cloud”, meaning that all our computing needs will be better served by some form of connected device, with a remote server doing the heavy lifting. Heck, it works for e-mail, why wouldn’t it work for the rest for our computer applications? We already have on-line word-processors and spreadsheets. There is even an on-line version of Photoshop, isn’t there?

I am not going to get into the great cloud-computing debate here, and I am by no means suggesting cloud-computing is not useful. It is, and in many cases such as e-mail, social networking, or heavily data-base driven applications (customer relationship management for instance), an on-line application is definitely the way to go. But for anyone who has ever worked in publishing, professional photography or video production, it is pretty obvious that we won’t get rid of our computer workstations any time soon.

Particularly in the case of the core software programs contained in Adobe’s Creative Suite, the host-based application is the only way to get the job done efficiently, and it will remain that way for many years to come. On the other hand, connectedness, data-sharing and collaboration are playing an increasingly important role, particularly in the creative fields. This is also one of the reasons why tools such as the Creative Suite need to evolve: to allow users to fully use the communication and collaboration potential of today’s internet infrastructure.

It is important to underline these trends this with respect to CS4. If one only listens to some starry-eyed technology observers spending most of their time checking e-mail or Twitter, one might assume that heavy-duty software applications such as the Creative Suite are a dying breed, dinosaurs, waiting to be obliterated by the big cloud in the computing sky. Not so fast…

Publishing and media are finally growing up

There is no doubt that on-line media and interactive content attracted the lions-share of attention in recent years, creating the impression that it was only a question of time that more established information-carriers such as print would completely disappear from our everyday life. But time has shown us that we need to be weary about simple assumptions. We do not live in a changing media space, where new replaces old, but in a constantly expanding media-cloud of different devices and information-instances.

Only truly redundant things go away. Print is going to be around for a long time, and so will be books, magazines and newspapers. The real challenge is in integrating them with all the other types of media, not in figuring out which one will survive.

Adobe CS4 bears witness to this trend, and the greatest benefit of the new release is certainly Adobe’s continued effort to pull individual applications closer and closer together. This is particularly important with regards DreamWeaver, Flash and other Macromedia technologies acquired when the two companies merged three years ago. CS4 finally makes it possible to export interactive content from InDesign to Flash, and continues the efforts to integrate video into the general media line-up.

In other words, yes, the Adobe Creative Suite 4 is an important product, because it reminds us that in terms of media, change is a given.

Any media producer out there needs to understand how to make all of these different media types work together. Not only that, but to figure out how to create excellence in each one of them, and how to move from one to the other without losing the essential investment in creativity. This is the new challenge.

Andreas Pfeiffer
(posted October 14, 2008)