Is it true that Finance rules the world now? Possibly. I’ve found more technology sneak peeks and roadmaps publicly disclosed in the November 2011 Adobe Financial Analyst Meeting videos than in a 365 days collection of blogpost rumors about Photoshop, InDesign, Flash and Dreamweaver. Wow. If you’re into Adobe (whether as a creative or developer) you must see at least the first three speeches by Shantanu Narayen (Adobe CEO), Kevin Lynch (Adobe CTO) and David Wadhwani (SVP/GM Digital Media), to properly understand where Adobe is headed to, and what their software will look like, and shape the creative world, in the years to come.

I admit I’m still a bit puzzled: Adobe is undergoing an utterly deep transformation, and it’s not clear to me whether in a direction that better fits my needs or not. Anyway, I’ll write a lot more in the future about this, so stay tuned. A brief glance of what you’ll see in the videos – I’m going to skip most of the financial stuff.

•  Vision and Strategy: Narayen presents Adobe’s (apparently equally bipartite!) commitment to Digital Media and Digital Marketing.
• Innovation: Lynch enters the details of both worlds: Creative Services (like the recently announced Creative Cloud), Creative Community, and Creative Apps (with information about software release cycles, mobile devices, etc), plus the Marketing Cloud that I’m not interested into.
• Digital Media Opportunity: Wadhwani talks about technologies Adobe is aggressively pushing (HTML5 above all), with the help of some of the recent company’s acquisitions (like Typekit, PhoneGag), and demoes coming features in InDesign, Edge, Flash for exporting (repurposing) digital content in a large array of devices.

That’s a massive amount of information, and will help figuring how and where to put our money (as Creative Suite users) and time resources (as developers) in the future. Any comment from you is welcome as always!

(Fun to see Tom Waits face coming up as a drawing in the Adobe’s slides 🙂 )