JD on EP

Remix creation: "We can take the video-editing expertise of the Premiere team and the Premiere Elements team and marry it with the Flex/Flash programming framework, which meant that we could get that video Remix product out very quickly, more quickly than we could have without Macromedia."

Remix marketing: "We could do this ourselves (the combined Remix and Photobucket offering). But it's nice to have the distribution channel. It's not exclusive to Photobucket. There is no reason we can't do it with the other social sites or content providers. Imagine some of the people already in the video content business, the media houses--why they wouldn't want their users to remix videos. We could offer that from Adobe directly, but offering that from Adobe directly means we have to deal with all of the host-based aspects of the business. The technical operations of collecting the advertising and handling the transactions. That's a pain."

Hosted Photoshop: "There are a lot of online photo editors, so we want it to be deserving of the Photoshop brand. We want it to be a good app. I'd be shocked if we didn't have something in the next three to six months. It would surprise me. What's surprising is that Photoshop Elements, at $99, is a significant revenue producer for Adobe. Even though you can get Picasa for free, people still want a full-featured product. Not as fully featured as Photoshop, but something in between." (This seems to be the line which, when paraphrased and published, drew the most headlines from bloggers... seems a little different in context.)

Apollo: "What's most exciting to me is Apollo. I think we, or someone else, gets to change the landscape of the Web. The way information is displayed on the Web today is kind of archaic. You can't express brand, you can't integrate graphics appropriately. Despite the fact that you have multiple media types, it's not as elegant as a newspaper or a magazine, in terms of look and feel, yet there is so much more capability. Through Apollo, we get to express that capability through rich Internet apps."

Apollo universality: "Eventually it will be a mobile technology. Some of it is the limitations of the devices. We want to take Flash Lite and have the ability to display Apollo or a subset of Apollo on mobile devices. First it will be Mac and Windows and then Linux."

Local/remote balance: "For those computing-intensive solutions, most of the work still has to get done on the desktop. Apps like Photoshop and Illustrator and InDesign. It's not a great experience to lay out a magazine remotely. Contributing to a magazine, that could be a host-based experience. So they will all be hybrid, but how much work is done on the host, and how much is done on the desktop will depend on the application. Real-time collaboration and the Acrobat connect stuff, that's all host-based. So it's really going vary by user, by app."

On using Vista-only features: "No. One reason was the timing on when Vista would really ship and our own timeframe. We didn't really know. Also, another reason is how many customers are really on Vista in the installed base and is it worth the work, especially in the creative customers. And we have no desire to really showcase Microsoft's technology. But we will be compatible with Vista. Whereas, with Mactel, we're really taking advantage of that fully. We had to recompile the apps to be Mactel compatible."

On Microsoft's intent: "I don't know if they are going after Adobe, but they certainly are going into many of the areas where we already participate. So I don't know if it is a direct attack or a byproduct of what they are doing. We have more reach to the end user, with PDF and Flash, than anyone, including Microsoft. It's greater than anyone else in the world, from a device perspective. I suspect they don't like that. You can ask them. "