Pop quiz: Which software company reaches the most people around the world? If you answered Microsoft, you'd be wrong. But you'd be hard-pressed to name the right one—Adobe Systems. The company's products launched the desktop-publishing revolution. Photoshop and Illustrator have long been mainstays of every designer's digital tool set. And Adobe's PDF has become the standard for exchanging documents. While its software may let its customers express their creativity, Adobe has for the most part stayed out of the picture. That may be changing, though, thanks to CEO Bruce Chizen's bold moves. First and foremost, there's his $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia last year, which made Adobe software the back end of sites like YouTube just as the online video trend was catching fire. Now Adobe's Flash, which displays video and animations, and Reader, which displays PDF documents, are spreading to cell phones too.
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