Daring Fireball: The Fish Rots From the Head

I like John Gruber's stuff, and I think his take on the Adobe-Macromedia merger is spot-on. In a recent rant/tirade/essay, he expands on the differences between companies run by "sales guys" and "technology guys":

Rather than expand into untapped creative markets, Adobe seems hell-bent on expanding into the jerks-wearing-suits market, a market that's completely at odds with the creative market they%u2019ve dominated for nearly two decades.

Adobe's best and core products are their oldest, and they are graphics products: PostScript, the Adobe Type Library, Illustrator, and Photoshop. InDesign is relatively new but genuinely fits alongside these products. This is why Adobe's core customers - who still use and love many of their products - are dismayed and confused by the company's direction in recent years. But is it any surprise that a company that is run by jerks-wearing-suits is now targeting the jerks-wearing-suits software market?

http://daringfireball.net/2005/04/fish_head

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