Acrobat 8: Beginning of the End of Adobe’s Current Product Cycle
We have been bullish on Adobe, on the basis of their current product cycle. In the past, the stock has rallied strongly ahead of major product releases, and this cycle has been no different. Now, Adobe has launched one of its major products.
Adobe Announces Availability of Acrobat 8 Software to Rave Reviews from Customers -
Acrobat 8 Professional for Microsoft® Windows® and Mac OS X, and Acrobat 8 Standard for Windows, are immediately available in English, French, German, and Japanese language versions. The Mac OS X version of Acrobat 8 Professional is a Universal Binary that will install on Intel® and PowerPC® based Macintosh systems. Acrobat 8 Professional is available for an estimated street price of US$449, and registered users of qualifying earlier versions of Acrobat1 can upgrade to Acrobat 8 Professional for an estimated street price of US$159. Acrobat 8 Standard is available for an estimated street price of US$299, and registered users of qualifying earlier versions of Acrobat2 can upgrade to Acrobat 8 Standard for an estimated street price of US$99. Additionally, Adobe Reader 8 is expected to be available in early December 2006.
Since we have been calling things pretty well on this so far, we will say that the rally may soon (at least temporarily) come to an end. Next Spring, the company is expected to launch the new versions of its Creative Suite, which includes such popular programs as PhotoShop and InDesign and will now include the Flash product line from its Macromedia acquisition. Once those products are launched it will be a while before they have a hot new update, and investors may lose interest until the next cycle is about to get rolling.
[…] We recently took profits on our Adobe (ADBE) position because we have noticed the stock tends to trade down following the release of a major new upgrade on the theory that there will be no more good news for a while. Of course, this is not the typical upgrade and things could be different this time. For one thing, the switch to Intel-based Mac support should be a significant demand driver for the company’s creative professional customer base. For another, it isn’t just a Photoshop upgrade, as some users are reporting. Think Secret - Adobe Illustrator CS3 shaping up to be most significant release in years A new feature dubbed Live Color will greatly ease color selection and management, helping designers find appropriate matching colors for their work, improving experimentation with new colors, and managing colors collectively, instead of individually. In implementing Live Color, Adobe has revamped the software’s Color Guide and Swatches palettes, adding such improvements as saving a set of colors as a group or extracting all the colors from a specified artwork in one step.The bulk of the enhancements will be found in the new Live Color dialog, which will sport a plethora of options, including the ability to easily color reduce artwork so that similar hues are mapped to tints or shades of a given color, as well as the ability to constrain color group selection to specific color palettes or spaces. […]