The forces of the digital revolution have shaken company after company. Industries have been transformed. Entire media and product forms have vanished. Pity the enterprise whose fortunes are tied exclusively to the analog world, be it producing film, renting videos, retailing books, or selling packaged software.
By many rights, one might have expected to find Adobe on the register of companies disrupted by digital. And yet the 35-year-old software developer has persevered. Really, it’s done more than that. Adobe has excelled, and it has done so by embracing the very technological forces — think cloud, mobile, platforms, IoT — that could very well have been the harbingers of demise for a legacy producer of packaged software designed for the desktop.