Art, Economist story...
The alchemist of paper
Apr 14th 2005
From The Economist print edition
economist.com
Bruce Chizen, the boss of Adobe Systems, wants to end bureaucracy as we know it
“IT'S exciting; we get to change society once again,” says Bruce Chizen, boss of Adobe Systems, the firm behind the popular PDF (or “portable-document-format”) files that are widely downloaded and e-mailed around nowadays. This is not, he adds, about making offices “paperless”, as some people—ludicrously, in retrospect—were predicting a decade ago. Instead, it is about bridging the separation between paper and electronic files in order to make all documents, in whatever form, “intelligent”, thereby blasting apart the way that paper-pushers in government and corporate bureaucracies work today.
If his vision becomes reality, it would be a remarkable vindication for Mr Chizen, who was not at Adobe when it last “changed society”—by launching the desktop-publishing revolution of the 1980s and early 1990s. John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe's bearded and boffinish founders, had invented PostScript, software that allows printers to reproduce text and graphics exactly as they appear on computer screens. It was followed by Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign, three applications used by creative types everywhere.
But Messrs Warnock and Geschke were lovable technophiles who proudly intoned that they were not in it for the money. As a result, Adobe never grew anything like as rich or powerful from its revolution as other software companies, notably Microsoft, did from their own. The founders realised during the 1990s that Adobe had to outgrow its “garage” culture. So they gradually handed over the firm to Mr Chizen, who had joined Adobe in 1994 as a marketing—and decidedly not an engineering—talent. Tough, and with a large dose of Brooklyn chutzpah, Mr Chizen in 1998 turned Adobe's culture upside down, introducing hierarchies, performance reviews and the like. In 2000, he became chief executive, and the founders co-chairmen.
That allowed Mr Chizen to return to his main passion, salesmanship, and in particular to a software application called Acrobat, the one Adobe product that has always been targeted at the wider business (as opposed to the narrower graphics-and-design) market. Acrobat turns any file type into a PDF document that will look, on screen and in print, exactly as intended, regardless of the computer or operating system. To open an Acrobat file, viewers need a bit of viewing software, called Reader, which allows users to fill in on-screen forms.
In the 1990s, when the internet was young and broadband connections rare, Acrobat was going nowhere. Adobe initially charged for Reader, and with few Readers there were few reasons to buy Acrobat. But gradually things changed. Adobe started to give Reader away, and broadband connections became common. Today, Reader is becoming ubiquitous, creating a huge audience for PDF files, and thus a market for Acrobat.
This has given Mr Chizen the opportunity to develop the market for Adobe products in a new direction. Last week, he was in Brussels to demonstrate how. Belgium will be the first country in the European Union to give its citizens electronic ID cards. And by plugging these cards into the USB ports of computers that have Reader, Belgians will soon be able to “sign”—ie, digitally authenticate and seal—PDF documents such as tax forms, mortgage applications, patent approvals and anything else that today requires a signature in ink.
The news is not that these forms can then be submitted electronically for instantaneous processing. Rather, it is what happens to those forms that are submitted on paper (because the owner is offline, say). Today, such loose-leaf is the atavism that disrupts all those bureaucratic workflows that are allegedly already electronic. For instance, billions of PDF forms have been downloaded from the website of the IRS, America's tax agency, in the run-up to this week's filing deadline. But most of these were then printed out and sent by mail, for poor drudges in some back office to type again into a computer. What a bore.
Adobe's trick—in effect, a sort of alchemy that turns paper into computer code—is a clever bar code at the bottom of its latest PDF documents. As a PDF form gets filled in on a computer, this bar code constantly changes so that all the information is captured. This includes not only the obvious (name and address, say) but also higher forms of “intelligence”, such as audit trails (who has read this form?), access privileges (who may view or e-mail it?), and business logic (who needs to see this form next?). When the form is then printed and sent as paper, it only needs to be scanned at the other end for all the data to enter their destination computers as if the form had stayed electronic all along.
What if Microsoft notices?
Insofar as this promises, one day, to end bureaucracy as we know it, everyone should be happy. But Mr Chizen's brief is to win Adobe's shareholders, this time, a disproportionate share of the joy. That is why, he says, he spends most of his time thinking about three things: Microsoft, software platforms and workflow.
Microsoft, Mr Chizen says, is scary because “PDF caught them by surprise”. As the business enters a new phase, Microsoft may see an opportune moment to trample into it. Mr Chizen, who in 1987 made the financially costly choice to leave a senior position at Microsoft to join a subsidiary of Apple, just as Microsoft began to clobber Apple (and others), knows what that usually leads to. Software platforms, he says, are crucial because of their network effects. Microsoft succeeded by making Windows a platform; Adobe can succeed by turning Reader into a platform, and building Acrobat and other applications on top. And workflows matter because that is where bureaucracies today get stuck, and where intelligent documents will make a difference. “This can easily become a $5 billion-a-year company,” says Mr Chizen. (Adobe is now barely a $2 billion-a-year company.) Failing that, it can at least, once again, change society. |
