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by adventured 2446 days ago
Adobe's market cap has gone from a stagnant $20-$30x billion, to being as valuable as SAP, in five years, solely due to their booming cloud subscription business. Previously the stock hadn't net climbed higher basically between the dotcom bubble in 2000 and 2013.

Here is their chart back to 1986:

https://i.imgur.com/lVeAGHQ.jpg

Sales were hardly moving for years and have soared since fiscal 2015, from $4.7b to $10.6b (last four quarters). In that time operating income more than tripled from $900m to $3b.

1 comments

And for Adobe, cloud is way more than just Creative Cloud and the subscriptions for Photoshop or whatever.

When Adobe bought Omniture, that was I would argue, one of the best acquisitions since DoubleClick, and Adobe has taken that and built out this very high-margin, very lucrative “marketing cloud” business for agencies and small businesses and large enterprises.

It’s genuinely impressive and brilliant to see how Adobe has turned its business around.

And as an end-user, I may dislike that it’s harder to pirate Photoshop (and if we’re legit honest, that’s what 95% of the complaints about Creative Cloud’s pricing comes down to), but if you’re a creative professional who relies on those tools, $600 a year is a worthwhile investment, especially since the updates have been higher quality and more frequent. My employer pays my sub but I’d pay it myself if I had to — just because it makes my life easier — and I’m not even a designer or video editor by trade (I do edit a lot of video, however).