...if you look at Macromedia — we understand each other's businesses and we've been watching one another for many, many years. Also, they are local. Many of the Adobe employees and many of the Macromedia employees live on the [San Francisco Bay area] peninsula, so getting from one place to the other is pretty easy.
But what about the potential issues you're going to face to make the combination work?
Any acquisition is hard. I think anybody who tells you acquisitions are easy or mergers are easy is lying. They aren't easy. But we're going about it with our eyes open.
What's different about the climate these days with all the consolidation going on in the industry? Was your thinking in doing the Macromedia deal that you need to be a certain size or you can't make it?
I don't believe scale really buys you anything.
So what convinced you to go after Macromedia?
Every year we go through our previous strategy plan... When we sat down this year, we talked about how to give users more of a rich experience, more animation, more graphics, more video and more collaboration around Acrobat. Then we took a look at Macromedia and said, "Jeez, if we had Macromedia as part of our asset base, we could speed up our execution against our strategy." Without that, we might have been late. That was driving me more than scale.
Is it because growth is slowing down for software companies?
Not for us. But growth is slowing down for a lot of software companies who were charging multiple millions of dollars to do back-end, infrastructure stuff. Back when money was free, a lot of IT guys had bosses telling them, "Whatever it takes, get it done." They would spend $40m on an ERP system or an HR system or a CRM system. Now the IT guy is saying, "Hey, we got burnt. We're not doing that any longer."
We recently spoke with the chief executive of Texas Instruments, and he said he expects stronger growth coming from demand for non-PC computing devices. How do you see the next five years shaping up in terms of this PC versus alternative-device debate?
My view is more people will view, consume and...
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