I helped drive Adobe's acquisitions of Typekit and Nitobi. AMA

Getting past the normal corporate mumbo jumbo, what did you see in the companies that piqued your interest? Was it a talent acquisition? Do you actually see these technologies being integrated with existing adobe technologies (specifically Flash)?

I watched your two M&A announcements today with keen interest, because I've been watching the overall market change and we're kind of trying to figure out where Adobe fits into things. Where we used to use flash, we're using HTML5 for web and mobile, and where we used to use Adobe SMS, we're now using brightcove, kaltura, and others. We're phonegap hackers as well.

I'm trying to figure out if Adobe is more interested in building supporting tools, or if Adobe is trying to build more of a "one stop" platform a la brightcove appcloud and what people have built out in various verticals for different toolsets (heroku for rails, brightcove for video, pantheon for drupal, etc). As you look forward from the M&A strategy, how do you see the technical solutions coming to market? Are you guys trying to do a rollup, or augmentative strategy? I'm only asking because a lot of recent technical offerings have been out of tune with out Open Source stack approach, and while I'd love to work more with Adobe products, it's been really hard to figure out how and where you guys fit into the new Open Source / Cloud / SAAS / Mobile / HTML5 & CSS3 landscape.

It's obvious you guys are trying to get in front of the trends, but I just can't figure out what that actually is going to look like six months from now.

Any insight there into the overall strategy? I know you might not be able to answer it, but I'd love to know.

Adobe's DNA seems to be to stuff as many features into a product, even if they're half broken. Does Adobe have a plan to prevent these new products from going the same way?

2- For every company you acquire how many companies do you look into and end up not buying?

How important is conflict resolution during these deals?

(This one is really broad and shows some ignorance) When you are driving acquisitions, do you treat the deal like a developer would treat a large project? Do you have a set of requirements that you work toward? Do you have to track changes and perform QA?

Do you have any recommendations for teams with lots of Flash-based content, to prepare for the transition to an HTML5 environment? Can we continue creating Flash content as we always have, trusting that Adobe will provide a means to migrate/recompile our existing FLAs or SWFs to HTML5 when the time comes? Or should we take any preparatory action to ease the transition? For instance, authoring our graphics using SVG, writing our code in an intermediate scripting language that may be compiled to ActionScript or JavaScript, etc?

I realize you might not be the best person to ask about this, but in your position it seems probable that you'd be aware of the roadmap for Flash. I realize the roadmap is confidential, but any tips or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Alternatively, if you could recommend someone for me to talk to about this, I'd be grateful.

EDIT: Any sort of response would be great. There seem to be a lot of folks here who are interested in this issue.

Just curious, but since the move of PhoneGap to an Apache incubator project was announced within such a relatively close proximity to today's acquisition, I can't help but wonder if the decision to open source the code was something Adobe was aware of.

I mean, you must have been in the process of doing the due diligence during this time, right? It leads me to speculate the decision was somewhat of a joint one, or, alternatively, that maybe there were points of contention around it.

This might touch on sensitive information so I fully understand if you'll have to pass on answering this one.

http://www.max.adobe.com/online/

Q: Say I have a product or a service that I think might be a very good fit for Adobe, including a realistic, well thought out business side of things. Is there a way to pitch it to the people of your position if I have absolutely no connections in Adobe?

This is a hypothetical question, just trying to understand options for seeding initial acquisition interest. Thanks.

When I heard the news, my immediate reaction was not positive. [...] No one I know is filled with joy when using Adobe products...mostly the opposite. Typekit is a great service; I hope Adobe keeps it that way.

(http://kottke.org/11/10/adobe-acquires-typekit)

This sums up my reaction, as well: I use Adobe products because I have to, not because I want to.

I assume you'd disagree with folks like Jason and I about the joylessness of Adobe products, but I'd guess that we'd all agree of the importance of keeping TypeKit simple and elegant.

So what safeguards, if any, have you been able to put in place to ensure that TypeKit maintains its je ne sais quoi as it becomes an Adobe product?

[EDIT: I'm hesitant to use HN for what might -- perhaps legitimately -- be seen as a rant. But this may be my only opportunity to make someone at Adobe having any degree of authority or ability to communicate with the relevant management, aware of this problem. Further, we are all at the mercy of Adobe technical support, to the degree we need it. And this applies, in this specific context, to the many students and staff on this site who might face issues in particular with regard to academic licensing.]

OT, but I recently spent in aggregate 7.5 hours [1] getting one your tech support to walk over to a manager and convince them to generate a correct license code for a thoroughly documented academic purchase, after the third-party licensing vendor who was supposed to do so failed to and then only, finally responded to an Adobe tech support rep, whom they told that they had no clue what license the Adobe tech support rep was talking about.

Said license generation and delivery took only 10 minutes, once Adobe tech support -- AFTER 7.5 HOURS of phone calls -- finally did it directly, themselves -- and for the first time, finally, did it correctly after also following my instructions as to what specific type of license was needed. (Rhetorical: What is wrong with this picture?)

Briefly put, someone needs to straighten out the delivery of secondary CS 4 license codes for support of academic purchasers of CS 5.x who are running Win XP 32 bit (said support being clearly described on the product package and in its marketing).

I realize that, officially, you are not the correct party to address, but since you're the only member of Adobe management who is likely to even see a comment on my part, let me just say that in this case your technical support, while always polite on the phone, sucked in terms of results and follow-up; you took several hundred dollars from the person I was helping while failing for over a month to deliver the product (license code) and support that was clearly described on the package; and on this basis I, personally, [changed to calm my tone down] cannot wish your company well.

(I was tempted to send your corporate HQ an invoice for my time, but I figured they'd be too obtuse and/or dismissive to get the point.)

1. I would never have spent that kind of time on the endeavor, except for the nature of my relationship with the purchaser.