How Adobe became Silicon Valley’s quiet reinventor

BY SILICON VALLEY standards, Adobe is a dull company. Nudging 40 it is middle-aged. It does not make headlines with mega-mergers or have a swashbuckling chief executive. “I feel very comfortable not being out there pounding my chest,” confesses its boss, Shantanu Narayen, in a rare interview. All the while, Adobe has quietly managed to adapt to the age of cloud computing. It has done a better job of reinventing itself perhaps even than Microsoft, the technology industry’s best-known comeback kid. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is said to have examined Mr Narayen’s handiwork closely—and not just because he attended the same secondary school in India as Adobe’s leader, albeit a few grades down. Since 2007, when Mr Narayen took the helm, Adobe’s market capitalisation has swelled from $24bn to $276bn. In the past ten years it has outperformed both Mr Nadella’s Microsoft and Salesforce, another rival business-software maker.