Shantanu Narayen

MAX 2013 and Our Creative Evolution

The energy at Adobe’s MAX Conference was incredible. More than 5000 gathered in the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles and tens of thousands more joined live over webcast, it’s clear that MAX is one of the leading creativity conferences in the world. 

From Postscript to Photoshop to Creative Suite and today Creative Cloud, Adobe’s mission has always been to help creative people create. I am incredibly fortunate to have spent the last 15 years here working with teams to bring great creative products to market. As I look back, several milestone events stand out in our journey:

My first major event was March 1999 – Seybold Seminars, the leading industry conference for desktop publishing, printing, and graphics. We launched InDesign at that show and revolutionized graphic design, giving designers amazing new levels of freedom and control in layout and typography. It still amazes me the kind of masterpieces that people create with InDesign – initially for print magazines, catalogs and newspapers, and more recently immersive and interactive digital magazines and apps on tablets and smart phones. 

In 2003, we first introduced Creative Suite at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Many customers were already using Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat, and what they wanted more than anything was for our products to work better together. Creative Suite represented close to a decade of innovation focused on addressing the challenges our customers were facing in producing great creative on the desktop. It started with many of the basic Suite capabilities that we all now take for granted – a common user interface and consistent handling of fonts, printing and transparency – and extended to include web, video, interactive media, and more magical new features.

At the last MAX 18 months ago, we unveiled the next step in the reimagination of the creative process:  Creative Cloud. Our goal is to make the creative process simpler, more connected and more collaborative – and we believe Creative Cloud is the answer. Creative Cloud is a membership service that enables us to bring frequent updates to our applications and services to our customers. This is a win-win for our customers, who get new technology at frequent intervals, as well as our engineers, who get to bring new features to market on a continuous basis. We have introduced a ton of new innovations since we first launched Creative Cloud last year. At MAX this week, we released a major update to the service. We showcased a stunning new set of CC applications, cloud services to access and publish content anywhere, and integration with Behance, a vibrant creative community. We also announced that Creative Cloud will be where we focus our innovation moving forward.  

Each new generation of innovation at Adobe – desktop publishing, Creative Suite, and now Creative Cloud – has been driven by what we believe is the best way to solve the challenges our customers face. Our goal is to over-deliver on our customers’ expectations and our employees are already hard at work on building new Creative Cloud innovations that take advantage of the power of cloud computing, tablets, and touch interfaces. The creative community has been at the core of Adobe’s business since our company was founded over 30 years ago. It’s why we get up every morning. There has never been a more exciting time to be a creative and there has never been a more exciting time to be at Adobe.