volume/price surge also correlates with article in red herring
..copies arrived by mail yesterday. although not containing
much new by adobe-watcher standards, warnock further hints at
an up-market enterprise strategy (workflow products for servers,
frame->XML, etc.) to complement the downmarket consumerization
of photoshop [almost zero cost development here for "a knockoff".]
also mentioned are market share numbers for various products, perceived ties to macintosh revenue, and semi-favorable analyst comments glossing over last quarters numbers with respect to the upgrade cycle. more interesting is a sidebar talking up adobe ventures 2, the new $40M hamquist-run portfolio.
quoting the first VC experiment: '"we've made a ton of money,"
says mr. warnock, "but the Street gives us no credit for it because
they view it as nonrepeatable income." he says adobe tried
distributing the stock dividends of its portfolio companies to
shareholders, but wall street didn't like that either. so over
the last two quarters, adobe has used the income generated from
adobe ventures to repurchase 7% of its own stock, which [....], has garnered a more favorable reaction from wall st.'
not discussed in the piece was that all the stock buyback plan
option arbitrage ended a couple weeks ago. going on for a
couple of years now, this helped serve to keep share prices flat
until the upgrades & new market push gathers steam. |
