“A major product refresh cycle is under way at Adobe Systems, and Wall Street is optimistic that it will provide significant growth for the company,” Patrick Seitz reports for Investor’s Business Daily.

“Adobe plans to release Creative Suite 3, the next version of its popular collection of graphic design applications, in the first half of 2007,” Seitz reports. “‘As far as the next product cycle, everything seems to be lining up,’ said Martin Pyykkonen, an analyst with Global Crown Capital.”

“Adobe is now integrating into its own products the products it got from its December acquisition of Macromedia. These products include Flash, for delivering multimedia content online, and Dreamweaver, for interactive Web design. For instance, Acrobat 8 contains Macromedia’s Breeze software for Web conferencing. Creative Suite 3 also will contain former Macromedia products,” Seitz reports.

“There’s a pent-up demand for CS3 among creative professionals who use Apple Computer’s Macintosh PCs, he says. CS3 is the first version of the product suite to run on Apple’s new Macs using Intel chips,” Seitz reports. “About 20% of Adobe’s total revenue comes from the Macintosh platform, MacMillan says. The rest comes from software for Microsoft’s Windows PC operating system. But the Mac share could be about 40% for the creative solution segment of Adobe’s business, he says. The company’s creative solution business unit accounted for 56% of Adobe sales through Sept. 1. Adobe’s knowledge worker solution unit, which includes Acrobat, was the second largest contributor, making up 26% of sales.”

“Pyykkonen predicts that Adobe will release CS3 on May 1… Creative Suite 2 came out in April 2005. The Creative Suite bundles products — such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat and InDesign — popular with graphic artists,” Seitz reports.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Apple, two birds, one stone: Buy Adobe and rewrite the apps properly with Xcode while discontinuing future Windows versions. (Hey, we can dream, can’t we?)

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