Illustrator, created back in 1987 Photoshop, acquired by Adobe in 1988 Acrobat, released in 1993 and so on - these and other apps now constituting the Adobe Creative Cloud.Īs Stensul points out, these solutions presupposed use by experts: creative specialists. As I said earlier, Adobe was originally known for creative solutions. It’s specifically a solution that lets a team collaborate on web design - and not just a team of designers, but content creators, copywriters and other stakeholders.īeyond specialism. One distinguishing feature of Workfront is that it is absolutely not what Dinkin would call a “single-player tool.” It gives stakeholders common visibility into workflows, approvals and project status.įigma, similarly, is not just a sophisticated web design solution. At the end of 2020, Adobe acquired the work management platform Workfront. “The reality is, as any designer knows all too well, that when you work in an organization, creating content is a collaborative process.” That may be obvious, but as Stensul founder and CEO Noah Dinkin points out in a thoughtful commentary on the acquisition, this insight is the connecting thread in Adobe’s acquisition strategy (Stensul is a collaborative platform for email creation).įrom Workfront to Figma. Oracle came out of computing and data, as did SAP.Īdobe, which can actually be credited with creating the first fully-fledged marketing cloud, ahead of IBM and Hewlett Packard (remember when they were in the race?), came out of creative and content, as well as analytics (Omniture). Salesforce, of course, had started out as a cloud-native offering for sales teams. The big players in what was once known as the “marketing cloud” space, but might now be better called the “customer experience” space, each approached it from a different direction. My contention is that this all stems from Adobe’s roots.
What’s interesting, of course, is why the big deal happened and how it fits into Adobe’s overall strategy. Okay, Salesforce paid more for Slack, but compare it to the $1.5 billion Adobe paid for Workfront. Adobe’s recent announcement of a definitive merger agreement to acquire web-first collaborative design platform Figma was remarkable, at first sight, because of the cost.
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