High-wire act. (Trade Talk).

Adobe, a maker of design software with revenues of more than US$1 billion, found a "magic bullet" in Acrobat: software that makes any document visible on any computer. Turning Acrobat into a cash machine, however, took a decade of marketing and hard work. Behind the effort is Bruce Chizen, who rose from a marketing job to become president and CEO of the San Jose, California, company two years ago. A veteran of Mattel Electronics, Microsoft and Apple start-up Claris Corp., Chizen talks with LATIN TRADE Connection Editor Greg Brown about business publishing intellectual property and his reading habits.

Most of your products center on making the Web look and feel like a print medium.

There are some products designed for somebody who is predominately print-centric. There are some products that help people enhance the information on the Web. And there are products like Acrobat, which help with business processes, both Web and print. It's really this new world what we and others are beginning to call networked publishing, where people want to be able to create information once and be able to re-purpose it, re-use it so it can be viewed anywhere, any time and on any device.

Acrobat has been a name builder for Adobe. Who's using it?

Acrobat has turned into a $300 million-a-year business. Most people don't think of it as being that large. In fact, last year when most companies struggled with growth, we were able to grow that business 41% on a year-for-year basis. The bulk of the $300 million in revenue today is being obtained from the business community, not from the graphics professional; the graphics professional only represents about 15% of the business. What's really driving the business is the need for the average business user to post or attach reliable business documents, either on the Web or via email.

How is the company diversifying?

Two-fold: digital imagining and digital video. Even though the economy is hurting, if you look at adoption of digital cameras around the world, it's happening and it's happening quickly. In some countries, like Japan, digital cameras outsold traditional film cameras this past holiday season, and we expect that to be a phenomenon that will happen around the world, as early as this Christmas. Same thing with DVD. If you look at the number of camcorders being sold that are digital versus traditional, most are now digital, and computers are now capable of working with that digital content.

What are you doing to respond to those trends?

What you'll see us doing is enhancing both our traditional products, like Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects, but we'll also be introducing new products that enable things like DVD authoring. The last and the biggest opportunity of all is all around Acrobat and ePaper, which is much more about efficiency.

Where is the greatest harm, violating a copyright or publicizing a method for violating it electronically?

Violating the copyright is the big issue. Whether you're selling software, movies, books or music, stealing intellectual property is a huge problem. In business software alone there's about $12 billion stolen each and every year. In the U.S., which everybody thinks of as a very sophisticated society, 25% of business software is stolen. We spend a lot of money creating our products. If we're not able to get paid for it, we're not able to take profits and reinvest and create more great products.

Your work revolves around computers. Do you read anything that's not on the screen?

I, to this day, get The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the San Jose Mercury News delivered to me every morning. I still find--especially early in the morning when my eyes are tired, and now that I'm getting older--[that] reading the newspaper is much more valuable to me in the morning while I have my coffee than reading on a computer screen. Everything else ends up being on the computer, on the Web.