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Adobe CEO Steps Down, Replaced by Former Apple Employee
by , 8:10 AM EST, November 13th, 2007
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen is stepping down and will be replaced by current COO and former Apple employee Shantanu Narayen. The changing of the guard will take place on December 1, but Mr. Chizen will remain on the the company's board of directors through spring 2008.
Mr. Chizen has worked for Adobe for 14 years, and was CEO for the past seven. John Warnock and Chuck Geschke, co-chairmen of Adobe's Board of Directors, commented "Bruce Chizen's vision has helped transform Adobe from a company that was known mainly for its popular design products into one of the largest and most diversified software companies in the world."
Mr. Shantanu joined Adobe in 1998 as vice president and general manager of Adobe's engineering technology group. He has also served as senior vice president of worldwide products, and executive vice president of worldwide product marketing and development. He co-founded the digital image sharing software company Pictra, and also held senior positions at Silicon Graphics and Apple.
Adobe is well known for its professional design applications including Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. The company also created Acrobat and the industry standard PDF document format along with the PostScript printer language.
Observer Comments
Tue Nov 13, 2007 12:09 pm Subject: Bruce's fault?
Tue Nov 13, 2007 12:38 pm Subject: Who else could be to blame?
Bruce was head honcho at the time. That's the way things work, when you're in charge you get blamed for the bad things, and get the credit for the good things. Besides the delays in their software releases was no accident. It was a choice not to start creating the software ports earlier. It was a decision to put most of their resources towards their windows business b/c it was sooooo much more important than Apple. It was also a decision to not work on a UB update for the existing product, but instead wait for the intro of a whole new product. By the time the mistake was caught all they could do to save their asses was release a public Beta. He f*#&*d up 
QuoteWell, regardless of past decisions, Adobe is a business. Placating the minority is pretty much always going to be a losing proposition. I care less about whatever dings might be in Chizen's track record than the fact that Adobe now has a monopoly on design software. CS3 is far and away their best set of releases in years, but I'm still concerned about the future of support and pricing.rvclblm wrote:
It was also a decision to not work on a UB update for the existing product, but instead wait for the intro of a whole new product.
On the other hand, for anyone who might be concerned about Adobe's future leadership... check out Shantanu Narayen's credentials at Forbes.com. He was arguably more qualified to run the show than Chizen, even during his tenure as COO.
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