Analysis Of The Strengths And Weaknesses That Will Impact Adobe’s Strategic Choices

Strategic Goal

Adobe’s largest revenue stream is from its Creative Cloud subscriptions. The overarching strategic goal is to maintain this revenue stream and maintain Adobe’s marketplace dominance. One key aspect of this strategic goal is to continue increasing the number of users subscribed to Creative Cloud. 57% of Adobe’s revenue came from these subscribers, which includes individual and company subscriptions. As Adobe continues to maintain dominance in the creative market, it needs to maintain growing the number of Creative Cloud subscribers.

Evaluation Criteria

Each of the following strategic alternatives will be evaluated by its feasibility, the implementation time frame, and how large of an audience it allows Adobe to address and potentially convert into subscribers.

Strategic Alternatives

Alternative 1: Adobe should expand its subscription tiers to better target creatives and artists who have not subscribed to Creative Cloud. This would allow more flexibility for users and would attract those who want to use Adobe products but are unwilling to use any of the existing subscription options.

Alternative 2: Adobe should make greater efforts to enter the education market and target those users beginning to enter the industry. These users are unfamiliar with any kind of creative workflow software. If Adobe can convert these users into subscribers, the high learning curve and integrated workflow of its products can keep users locked into the system for the long-term.

Alternative 3: Adobe should partner with gaming companies to enter the gaming market. The gaming market is a large and untapped area for Adobe. Entry through partnerships could entice gamers to use its creative software for live streaming of games and collaboration.

Strengths and Weaknesses

Adobe has a number of strong internal strengths. It has successfully transitioned from the licensing based business model to a subscription-based business model. This points to a strong internal commitment and focus to embracing new untested ideas at a time when subscription models on that scale and in the industry were largely untested. Adobe also has a wide portfolio of products that are used internationally by creative professionals and businesses. These products like Premiere, Photoshop, and Illustrator are the some of the most commonly used programs for their respective industries.

There are a number of glaring weaknesses. Adobe is not very known for listening to and responding to customer feedback. Users of its software have voiced many complaints about some of the limitations it places in software in order to make it more universally useable on both simpler and more advanced computers. The small but vocal minority of Linux users do not have Adobe software and there are no foreseeable plans to port the programs to the Linux operating system. And, Adobe was known for a time for the Flash Player software used for developing Internet applications and viewing videos online. The software was notoriously buggy and had many security flaws. Although major Internet browsers and tech companies vocally opposed the software as early as 2010, it took Adobe 7 years to announce their decision to end support of Flash by 2020. Today, almost all major browsers function without Flash, but the ghost of Flash and Adobe’s reluctance to fix or kill Flash haunts the company.