The Vergecast - Chief Product Officer of Adobe Scott Belsky returns

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Chief Product Officer of Adobe Scott Belsky chats with Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel and reporter Dami Lee about what he learned from putting Photoshop on the iPad, adapting products to new creators and platforms, Creative Cloud for the Mac Pro, and the goals of the Content Authenticity Initiative. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey, everybody's now from the Vergecast on this week's interview episode. Dami Lee and I sat down with Scott Belski. He's the chief product officer

of Adobe. He's the co-founder of Behance. I really like talking to Scott. He's got big ideas. We talked about what is going on with Photoshop. We obviously talked about Creative Cloud

when it's going to get optimized for the UMAC Pro. We're reviewing that right now, so it's on my mind. We talked about Illustrator coming to iPad. We talked about what he learned doing Photoshop on the iPad

and what he is bringing to that release calendar. He's pretty excited about that product, actually. It's really interesting. And we talked about basically deep fakes and how to make sure content is what you think it is. Adobe's working on something called the Content Authenticity Initiative. It's just getting started. We got into that a little bit. Really interesting conversation. Like I said, I really like talking to Scott. He's got big, big ideas. Check it out. Scott Belski on the Vergecast. I'm here with Dami Lee. Hello, Dami. Hi. And Scott Belski, the chief product

officer of Adobe founder of Behance is in the studio with us. Welcome, Scott. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. It's been a couple months since you're on the show. How are things? It is. Things are going well. We're off to a good start in 2020. A lot of exciting plans for the year ahead. It should be a fun one. Yeah. So last time you were here, we talked a lot about products and tools. I want to start with kind of the big announcement that's happened since. You put Photoshop for iPad into the world. It happened. You can do Photoshop on your iPad. We broke the seal. It's here. I would say it's had a mixed reaction. Some people are excited about it. Some people think it's not real, quote unquote, is a very. I think a loaded phrase. What have you learned from this experience? Yeah, I think it's, well, what I have known with the team from the early stages of this project is that we were not going to try to release 30 years of features or port Photoshop as we know it on the desktop

to an entirely new platform and interface. And so as a result of that, we had to prioritize the features that we know that any Photoshop user uses most of the time. And we also had to prioritize the features we wanted to reimagine and in some cases collapse into one another and make sure we bring those new almost in some ways new uxes over for different ways of doing things in Photoshop. And we had to also take into account the new customer and also make sure that we satisfy a very seasoned Photoshop desktop user who wants to augment their workflow. When we talked about making sure that this was a real Photoshop as opposed to one of the many consumer apps in years past where we've used the Photoshop brand.

We were trying to send a very clear message that this would be the same engine. And so whatever you did on this, you could pick up where you left off on Photoshop desktop and vice versa, which is a major technical achievement. And then I think a lot of people interpreted that as, oh, then that means that anything I can do on Photoshop desktop. The same features will be on iPad, which, again, we tried to articulate wasn't the right solution, especially out of the gate. And that didn't, I think we could have been more clear on that. And one thing I've learned and been pushing all of our teams to do is be very transparent on

their roadmaps, too. I mean, you'll notice now with Photoshop on iPad, we've actually come out and said, here's what's next. Here's why. And really trying to be very anchored with empathy with the customer. Any Photoshop desktop user obviously still has Photoshop desktop, this is something that augments their workflow. And so it's successful in that regard. There are a ton of new customers. We've had over one million downloads now of Photoshop on iPad. And, you know, out of the gate, I think there were some features that people really wanted desperately. There were some people that were just shocked by the fact that they, you know, that certain things weren't there. But we've recovered. We're getting much closer now to a

four-star rating, which has been a dramatic recovery since the initial, you know, when people kind of reacted. And I think it's the result of us just being really tied to customers and trying to focus on what they want. How are you thinking about that feature release cadence? You're obviously being more, you are talking about what's coming more. Yep. But are you trying to accelerate to catch up to where you think you need to be? We are. And this team has been released, I think on a monthly basis, maybe on the holidays, we went through a month and a half. But the team has been, it's an agile team. We're releasing very frequently. We're not kind of like saving it all for like one, you know, one annual blast.

And again, it will be anchored by real workflows that customers are doing that we think are a step function better with the iPad. Give me an example. Now that you've got it out in the world. I think when you launched it and you were on, we talked a lot about compositing. It was like the core use case. Now it's out in the world. What are you seeing that's surprising? What are you seeing that you're seeing that's surprising?

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of on-the-go compositing types. I mean, one of the actual big features that people are requesting that we're going to deliver in the first half of this year is true interoperability with Lightroom on iPad. So that professional photographers that have adopted the Lightroom ecosystem for iPad and desktop, you know, they're saying, oh, I just need to be able to bring this into Photoshop on iPad and I'll be so much happier. So that's something that we're going to bring really quickly that I'm sure will be used quite often. But all sorts of selection type, you know, masking type stuff, compositing. There's a some new, the new content aware of fill stuff, but also the sense a driven selection stuff has been really popular since we shipped that. And yeah, I mean, I'm sure I could get you a deeper list, but those are some of the some of the most common, you know, use cases across. And then there's also, you know, not to be forgotten, there's a product.

called Adobe Fresco, which is a painting and drawing application, standardized on a cloud PSD, a cloud Photoshop file. And so what we also see a lot of customers doing is using Fresco with Photoshop on iPad, so like these two apps together because they're both in the cloud and they're interoperable. So that was another big thing he has launched with Photoshop. And iPad was PSD in the cloud. Yep. We talked a lot about where it lives.

Like do you have a subscription file service? Can you use it with the other file systems? What's that take up like as you trying to transition people into the cloud file format? Yeah, we prompt anyone on Photoshop desktop now to save a cloud PSD if they want. And a lot of them do. Right now, the real only benefit, frankly, is to work across multiple surfaces. So if you log into Photoshop elsewhere, all your files will be there. And also if you log in on Photoshop on iPad, of course, your documents will be there as well.

But if you look at what we've done with at AdobeXD, which is a little ahead of the cloud document adoption curve, now we have co-editing that's live. We have seamless sharing. and the large, you know, the mass of more than, well more than half of the XD users are saving cloud documents by default now. And so we're likely going to take the same roadmap with Photoshop desktop as well, or Photoshop cloud documents. And so you can imagine seamless sharing, things like live co-editing and things like that, you know, making their way into Photoshop as well, which I think will increase the value proposition of using cloud documents. Yeah. Do you think if Photoshop for iPad is,

It's funny. I'm asking many of the same questions, and the last time I was like, well, we'll see. And now I'm like, what did you see? I mean, the question around the iPad forever is, like, can this replace your laptop? Yep. It's a tiresome question I feel we'll be asking for the rest of our lives. But, like, Photoshop is one of the core apps that needs to be there to answer that question for a huge number of people.

Are you seeing this as multi-surface extension of the main product? Are you seeing this is going to go off on its own trajectory? What's your sense of it right now? Oh, I'll tell you. I have a great proxy for the. this answer, which is Lightroom. It was a desktop-only product. We brought it to mobile as well, iPad and phone, Android, all platforms. We found predominantly at first, it was mostly people using it a little bit on the other surfaces, but mostly on the desktop. And then we saw a new type of

customer come in that was mobile only. And now we kind of have a really broad set of our customer base that are using really legitimately both, and a lot that are mobile only. And some, of course, that are still desktop only. I think it will be the same type of thing. I mean, right now, we're only seeing extension use and then these new customers coming in who are probably fully satisfied because they don't know what they're missing. Yeah. And they're not power Photoshop users for many, many years. They just, they're getting what we know they would need for a basic Photoshop perspective. So I think you're going to see that continue. So the, the Lightroom Mobile customer ecosystem, I always think of it in terms of like influencers selling

their preset packs. That's like a new economy that exists that. It's just a market that wasn't there like two years ago. It's a new way to make a living, basically. Are you leaning into that? Are you saying like, okay, we know that like your favorite Instagram influencers are going to sell presets to you. We can make that easier.

We can we can maybe take a cut of that revenue. Like that's a whole, it literally is a market that never existed. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, the new zen, if you will, of this product that I talk about a lot with the team is that we want to make everyone a better photographer. I mean, you can get a cloud photo storage solution with your mobile phone tightly coupled and free for the most part. But it's not going to make you a better photographer.

Lightroom has all of the bells and whistles, but it also has this new Discover tab. And if you click on any image in the Discover tab, source from amazing photographers around the world, you'll actually be able to click and see how they made that image amazing, edit by edit by edit. And then, to your point, you'll be able to save the pre, you can already save the preset. and to the question of will we allow people to, you know, sell their preset as opposed to make it available for others to use? I mean, if the market wants it, why not? You know, and whether we take a cut or not doesn't matter.

To me, it's about making sure that people can become a better photographer using this product. We have a great business model, a subscription. We don't need to be a marketplace. What we need to do is make sure that people, you know, their potential is realized. But that's a very different base of lightroom customers than your classic lightroom class, like literally Lightroom Classic pro photographer, which is a fairly intimidating app to use. And those emerging? You know, I think that, I mean, an interesting insight I've had recently spending a lot of time

with Lightroom Classic customers and Lightroom CC customers. A lot of Lightroom Classic customers, yes, they've been using that product for a long time and they don't want anything to change. Yes, there are a few features that they're waiting to migrate over. Some of them are like, hey, when you have watermarking, which we're going to be shipping soon, by the way, I'll come over to Lightroom CC. but a lot of them basically tell me, hey, I've got, you know, gigabytes and gigabytes of images. And it just doesn't make sense for me on day one to just, like, port all of this archive

imagery from 30 years of being a photographer over to the cloud when I, like, barely ever go back to them, you know? But I still want a source of truth for all my images. And so that's Lightroom Classic today for me. And so I think that's a, that's a problem for us to solve. Maybe there's some form of hybrid storage solution. and maybe there's some other way we can accommodate that need. But at the same time, Lightroom Classic is its own product.

We actively invest in the development of it. And I've always had that mentality of if we have two divergent set of customers with different types of needs, like serve them both. It just seems like it's called Classic. And that usually implies like, okay, this is the black and white Magintosh version of this. And like one day you're all going to have a color Mac and that's Lightroom. It's not even CC anymore. It's just Lightroom, right? Yeah, it's still Lightroom CC.

I mean, it's Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. So, yeah, to your point, it's, there's a, if there's a brand new customer coming in, we very much want them to use Lightroom CC because we know their mobile lifestyle. We know that 99% of those folks probably would thrive in that product. But there is a subset of very established, amazing photographers that have really entrenched workflows in Lightroom Classic. And we just did enough diligence in developing our strategy to know that that's an important product and it's a very important base of customers. And that's okay. They both happen to be called

Lightroom, but they're different. When you say classic, it implies like, it means that it's not going to change a lot. I mean, frankly, it means that we're not going to, we're not going to screw with you. It's really the message we're trying to send with that brand. It's like, we know you have an established workflow. We know you want it to work a certain way. We're not going to like flip a switch on you and change it drastically. And I think that's an important promise to make to customers. So it's funny. None of the questions we wrote. I know. I was going to. I can't help it. But it's interesting the thing about Adobe having these two sets of very different customers

where you have the professionals who are using Lightroom Classic, and then you have people like me who don't really know how to edit photos, but just kind of grew up with Instagram and these programs that do it for you. And it seems to me like Adobe is kind of going in this new direction and introducing these new software like Arrow and Photoshop camera that's designed for people so they don't have to learn coding to do things. and so what do you make of Adobe strategy for this new class of users? Well, I think, you know, two things I would say.

One is the mission of our business is creativity for all. And the sort of the ethos I continually repeat is let's make sure that our products are powerful enough for professionals, but accessible to everyone. Now, of course, you know, some products like After Effects or Premiere Pro, we shouldn't try to make that product accessible to everyone because you will, dumb it down so much that, and so there's a professional set of workflows we must respect. However, the desires of people to do, to achieve that level of outcome, output, or to create something in video or something in motion with something like After Effects, I think it is part of our mission to allow anyone to do something like that, maybe with a different product. And so what you're seeing now, for example, with Photoshop camera, which is something that we're

still testing and iterating, but the idea there was there are a lot of people out there who just don't have the desire nor the time nor the skill set to open up Photoshop and replace the sky or do something crazy with an image, let's let them do that at the point of capture leveraging some of the same technology as Photoshop. I won't use the term real. I'll say the real deal or Photoshop. But it's not about porting Photoshop into the camera, but it is about enabling people to do something creative that Photoshop could only do at the point of capture. And so that's the strategy is to make sure that we're, we are best in class and always amping up the bar for the power of each of our products,

but then also making sure that the different segments of customers that are now coming in saying, I want to do that too, but I don't have the skill set nor the desire to learn how to use that complicated product. What's the answer for me? And that's where you will see Spark. You see Photoshop Express, which, by the way, has over, I think I can say this publicly, but around 20 million monthly active users. This is a mobile app, Photoshop Express.

have, of course, Photoshop camera. You have all the, I said Spark already. And then you have Rush. Right. And then West Sweet. Premier Rush. How's Premier Rush doing? So Rush is actually doing pretty well right now.

It is for the YouTube creator, the people who like really, it's interesting, of the super, super powerful YouTube creators out there, they have their own teams that are now doing stuff. And they're probably using Premier Pro. They are using Premier Pro. But for a lot of the folks that are just getting started, but, are actually taking it seriously. They want professional grade title sequences, you know, effects, that kind of thing.

Premier Rush has done very well with them. And actually, YouTube has helped us get the word out to those folks as well. It's funny because Premier Rush just partnered with TikTok. So now there's like a TikTok integration. You can publish directly there. But I'm also curious, how does that compare with the in-app remixing features and like all these new features that teens are using on TikTok where it's to the point where they basically don't need another video editing app to make their memes.

Well, let's talk about that because I think you look at Instagram, you look at TikTok, you look at Snapchat, you look at all these places, and they're building some of their own native editing applications. Those have to work for everyone. But then there's a subset of people who, for whatever reason, say, I want my stuff to look different. I want to do something that people are like, how did he do that? How did she do that? Whether it's a type of font they want in their title sequence that's not offered as a default template, or they want to import something that is not the native AR experience that Snapchat offers, but maybe they want to make something on their own an arrow and then use it. And so there's a subset of this world in every

industry that wants to be creative and wants to do something different, and we want to be there for them. Well, that's like a big think of an idea, and I feel like it's always good to talk to you about big things of ideas. TikTok is successful because it obviously has a viral distribution platform and an algorithm that works and all the things that it does. But it is also a really good video editor. Like, I'm routinely impressed that the edits people are able to just sort of concoct in TikTok, and they've, right, the app just sort of, like, leads them through it and they make it.

There is probably a market of people just above that. That's who you're talking about. Yep. But isn't the rise of a TikTok or the rise of an Instagram in stories, isn't the market bigger at that zone, right? They're bringing people into being video editors in a way that no one ever conceived in themselves being a video editor before. If you think about it, I always like the whole 991 view of the world as it relates to the creative desires of a general platform of people.

And you have 90% of people who just want to upload an image or just consume other people's images and they probably don't make any edits at all. Maybe they apply a filter. Then you have the 1% of the under the spectrum. These are like the core Adobe customers, right? The 1% of us that are creative pros that will spend hours and hours to make something exactly what's in their mind's eye. And that's our bread and butter today as a company. But then there's this other 9% of people that are actually coming out of that larger group that are saying, you know, I want to stand out, I want to do something different.

I am willing to have a learning curve. Maybe not the one that requires me to go to school, but like, or watch, you know, hours and hours and hours of training videos. But I want to like, I want to do something different. And when you see a company like TikTok opening up their platform to third-party apps, I think what you're seeing is that they realize the things. value of these people for their platform. Yeah.

You know, they want people to do stuff that looks professional that makes people jealous and, you know, amazed and humbled and, you know, and they want that. And the only way they're going to do that is by working with partners like us because they can't build that level of complexity into their tools for the 90. Otherwise, the 90 will get confused, right? And so that's like, I think, an opportunity for us as a company. So when I think about Instagram, right now Instagram has filters. Like other people can make filters.

We've made filters, Tommy, make some filters. But they've got their core ones. And then, you know, like every other platform, they can just look at what's popular out in the world and just like take it. Yeah. Do you feel like you're in that kind of arms race as like the creative tool company?

Like people are going to invent some stuff on using your tools. And that's going to obviously drive people to you. And then one day Instagram or TikTok is going to wake up and be like, man, everyone's tinting their pictures blue. Now that's default and you've lost that market. Are you? Well, I mean, if you look at Visco, Instagram, I mean, any of these products,

where did they get a lot of their UI for creative editing? They got it from us. Yes, that's the spicy quote I'm looking for. Right? And so it was just great, by the way, because then they democratized some of this technology and interface design that was only made for pros, and they made it available for everyone.

Fantastic. And now it's our job to then continue to innovate on the pro side and to see where the line is of what a general purpose platform like that can do for everyone, and then how we bring the bar up to make people better. And listen, every time a new version of Android or iOS ships, there are new features for their default camera editing, right? And that's great, because it's making that functionality more available to everyone, and it keeps us on our toes to say, okay, but of those people, what will only 10% of them want to do that only they can do with us? And that makes us reimagine the future of, and that makes us reimagine the future

image and editing and AR and you know how to mix things like motion graphic sequences with things like you know video and animation like character animator just got nominated for an Oscar it's an amazing like next generation animation tool that a lot of people are now using and yes there are a lot of like clunky little apps out there that do animation but when people want to do something better you know I think that's our sweet spot do you ever look do you have like a team that like looks at memes and mean like we got to We got to make it easier to make that specific meme. The one I'm always thinking about is when they put fake arms and eyes on something that's falling down.

You know the way of the way of your arms. I do know what you're talking about. Thank you, Don't. You're not a totally old man. We've got a decent collection of crazy, crazy stuff on stock that people use all the time, pulling in our products and making some surprising things. And then, you know, Spark, which doesn't get a lot of attention. But, you know, we believe that we believe that we.

have a better solution for the business communicator or knowledge worker, if you want to call them that. The people who are in any company or on social media marketing teams who don't have design skills, want to make amazing things for social media, memes, whatever it is, I like to say that the best brands in the world now are able to think and act in real time. Just like when the Super Bowl lights went out a few years ago and Oreo within 30 seconds was like you can still dunk in the dark in order to do that. What had to happen? First of all, there had to be people empowered to come up with something crazy and creative and do it within 30 seconds.

They needed to have access to the brand's source of truth assets and the logos and the right fonts and whatever else. Stock photography that they could use, that they were authorized to use. I mean, there's a lot of plumbing behind the scenes that enables someone to do that in 30 seconds

versus going to the design team or even worse, going to the agency and waiting for a cycle of work to be done. In order to do that, you need a product like Spark. And you need a connection between this social media marketing product and a product like Photoshop on iPad or phone to do something quick. And you need access to your company's design system and Creative Cloud Libraries.

You can grab the latest brand and use the right fund and all that stuff. And so we're trying to make sure that we build this system for that world of the future where brands have to think and act in real time. Man, I've heard that Oreo story in so many different contexts. And that's the first time anyone's like the software is the critical. Oh, if you talk to like brand people, I don't know. know. I don't want to be. Yeah, I want to hear what you do here. I don't want to be too dismissive. But if you talk to marketers, like the idea that was approved that fast is the thing that they

talk about. How do we make ourselves reactive on social media to an event so that we're part of the conversation? I think you got to empower social media marketers to do their thing. I think right now social media marketers are perhaps too empowered. The brands are added again. Yeah, the brands have just like been fully added. Right now it's like silence brand. Yeah. I don't know. I'm loving some of these accounts on Twitter. like the Netflix account and they're just and they're riffing off of each other and suddenly like a chicken brand and a video streaming brand or like talking to one another and it's like my head

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Terms and conditions apply. We've talked a lot about mobile stuff. We've talked about mobile creators. I want to talk to you about the actual classic workflow stuff because there's like a revolution in that hardware. The way you've been talking about has been sort of abstracted from the nuts and bolts of computing. And I think that's really interesting. But I know, this week we had MD CEO Lisa Sue on the show.

She's like, I make chips. The chips are really fast. We're going to run them really hard. Right before we started talking, I was telling you that we bought a Mac Pro. We're like waiting for all the software to catch up to it so we can make use of its GPUs and it's the afterburner card. It sounds powerful and sophisticated. It does. I love it.

The after burner card at this point does nothing unless we use Final Cut Pro. So there is a lot of bespoke hardware in the world that can make your applications faster. How are you, is like the product guy thinking, okay, I need to address the number of people who are going to build AMD PCs or the number of people who excitedly rushed out to buy a Mac Pro and they've got a, Apple's got a very different idea about performance and anybody else. Well, I mean, it's no secret that we have deep relationships with all of the major hardware manufacturers out there. We are developing. And, I mean, even, you know, Apple came out and publicly talked about the fact that we informed a lot of their decisions they made for the iPad Pro to run some of the things that we wanted to build for the iPad Pro. And so the same goes, obviously, for their desktop hardware.

And, you know, it's not just Apple. It's HP. It's, you know, Lenovo. it's a bunch of others that we talk to about what they're doing. And then we even at the chip level, I mean, Abe, our CTO has gone in and met with the AMD folks and others. And because we know that, first of all, we haven't talked about the role of AI in creativity. But what it's going to do is it's going to speed up a lot of the repetitive, mundane, annoying stuff that we do every day that can really just be done quickly on the edge and push back to us and just exponentially increase our productivity as creatives. I'm excited about that day where you're doing something again redundantly for the fifth time,

and then it just says, oh, are you trying to achieve this? And you're like, oh, yeah. And you just save yourself like an hour of work. That's possible, but we need the chipset to support it. We need the software to support it. We need the UI to support it. I mean, there's a ways to go. So those are the nature of those conversations.

A lot of companies are also evolving the chips, making their own chips. And then they'll come to us and say, hey, for this sort of rendering action that typically takes this long, what could we do for you that would make an exponential, you know, uh, improvement for your customer because they know that's what will sell hardware. So give me an example of that. What's something on the sort of hardware side of performance side where you're saying, okay, I'm waiting for this turn because it's going to change our product or change how people use the product. Uh, you know, I got to be careful. I know you're not going to tell me Apple's roadmap, but unless you will, which would be great. Um, I mean, I, listen, you know,

as well as I, just the nature of these chips is changing a lot. The nature of what's CPU and GPU and like how computer is done, how the cloud is leveraged, what sorts of AI things can be done native locally on the client's side as opposed to always dependent upon the speed of going back and forth with the cloud. I mean, these are all the types of things that are topics. Yeah. The future is good. Wow. That was, you're like, I will discuss none of my partners. All right, so I'm going to try to ask you more specifically. Apple announced iPad OS is going to allow you to import directly from an SD card. You said, we're going to be there. And we are. You are. But that shit, they announced it in September and you shipped in December. What was, what was the middle of that? I mean, we had to

wait for the iOS to support it. So it was as simple as that. And then Apple announces the Mac Pro, here are all these, here are these dual GPUs. We want move render to the GPU. We're not doing that yet. What is that conversation like for you guys? I mean, when they, when they come and share where they're headed. We get some key engineers to, to jump in, get some early access, make sure that things are working and, A, if you don't want anything to break. Yeah. But then start to find the, you know, the opportunities to really, I mean, that's like the later stage process to make sure that the product is optimized and taking the greatest advantage of the hardware. But then there's, like, the way, you know, way, way, way before that is where we get to sit down with our partners and

talk about what ifs. Like, what if? what would make this significantly faster or significantly better? Or are there something that we want to do that the device just won't support for some reason? And then, like, how do we accomplish that? And what kind of has to happen in the future roadmap? And sometimes we'll get a sense of when that's hitting so we can then, you know, resource our teams appropriately. It's an art as well as a science. Yeah.

I mean, are there bets you haven't taken? I mean, I just, we do have this new Mac Pro. So I'm thinking about the original Mac Pro. Yep. And it seemed like nobody actually bet. on that GPU architecture. It just didn't go the way they thought it was going to go. Is that in the category of bets, you looked at it and you said, we actually don't think this is going to work? Or is there an ecosystem? Or is there a collection of those kinds of things

where you're like, we're actually not going to take that step. We're going to bet on this instead. Well, as a general rule, we are focusing on the obvious things, right? What are our customers? Where are they? What do they need? What are their problems? Will they solve a problem? and, you know, only for a few people or for a lot of people. And it's tricky. I mean, listen, I think about this a lot. I just went through the whole resource allocation process for all of our teams. And there are more and more platforms than ever before.

Obviously, Microsoft just came out with the Surface Pro that has the armship. The ARNship. And so that, I mean, to us is an entirely new platform. To the customer, it'll be like, hey, do I want that Surface Pro or that surface? You know, but to us, it's a big deal. And that took a years where. of work and careful, you know, set of planning around which products do we need to bring for arm support and why.

But if you think about it, Arm and not Arm are in Windows, and then we have Mac, and then we have iPad and an iPhone, and then, like, you know, you have Chrome and then you have some web apps. I mean, it's just, it starts to grow and you realize, you know, having many, many platform teams for the same product, it starts to bifurcate your focus. So we have to be very careful about the order of priorities and where the customer needs the most. And that, is that getting more complex because of this focus on the next set of customers? Because I mean, you're, you're pro customers. It feels like you're like, look,

you all depend on this for your work, right? Like, just buy the fastest hardware you can, we'll be there. Yeah. For everyone else, it's like a huge spectrum. It's, it's the new customers, but I can't emphasize enough that our long-term customers are using, obviously, mobile a lot in their lives. They're also, you know, mobile forward people. and they're starting to say to us, hey, I mean, for one example, like one breakout product that really emphasizes this is Capture, Adobe Capture, where you can just like point and click and capture colors, fonts, brushes, shapes, you know, textures, materials, like all kinds of stuff. It brings it into a CC library and you can access it across all of our desktop products. I mean, that was one of the first products where we were like, oh, wow, all of our desktop-only customers are using this mobile product a lot. It's a perfect conduit, you know, or perfect complement, rather, to what they're doing. So we're seeing more things like that, lightroom, Photoshop increasingly, as we talked about. You haven't surprisingly asked me about Illustrator. We're going to get to that. But, you know, we're continuing this vision to expand beyond the desktop across our franchises.

All right, do it. I mean, I talked to the Illustrator product team, and it did sound like they were, they've been working on it for years, like even, you know, before the hardware supported it. And So now, I guess I'm just wondering, like, knowing what you know now from the Photoshop for iPad Rollout, how would you apply those lessons to the Illustrator rollout? Right. Well, I think, I mean, what's interesting about the Illustrator on iPad, and maybe it's because they have had the opportunity to, we wanted to ship first with Photoshop, and so we kind of gave them more time.

And as a result, they came up with a lot of very novel things you can only do on iPad. that you can't even actually reproduce on the desktop. I mean, you could with like a lot of time. Yeah. But like the sort of the radial things that they're doing and some things with gradients and whatever else. And so I think that, and you could even argue that Illustrator on iPad is even like a more natural like place to spend most of your time as someone. Because if you were on illustrator on desktop using a walk-in board or a pen of some sort, you know, for a lot of other forms of illustration, and it just feels natural to just start using it on your lap.

So I have an incredible amount of confidence in this product out of the gate. It still will lack some features that we don't think should be in version one for reasons of complexity or reimagination or simply not taking years and years to ship this thing. But there will be some cool things that you can only do on that product. I think that people will start using it immediately with its system intention. So you'll work on desktop, do something on iPad. and then come back to desktop. I think we'll see a lot more of that right away on Illustrator.

And we're really excited about it. Are you going to over communicate now that you've learned to be more transparent with the feature all? I'll be like, we know this isn't here. We've scheduled it for there. Are you not willing to make that? Well, what I do, I mean, certainly one thing I want to do is articulate to customers, what I mean by its real Illustrator code base in the sense that you can.

Do you say it again? I'm going to use code base instead of anything else. But you can pick up where you love. off. Like, this is a system extension. So it is, it is really illustrator as opposed to, you know, something that is just using that brand. I felt so strongly in making that case because we, you know, we have kind of used these brands before for consumer apps that didn't deliver on any compatibility or interoperability that people would expect. And so I wanted to articulate what that really, the difference and what was involved with that. And, you know, of course,

you can only go, the story has to be very, very simple for everyone to understand it. So that's one lesson I've learned. So with Illustrator, yeah, I will try to make that clear. But it's the system message that we will never compromise on. And even in V1, Photoshop on iPad did not compromise on is interoperability, pick up where you left off, reliability. I mean, a lot of things people take for granted were freaking hard to do. But we weren't going to ship until they were perfect. Illustrator is like a notoriously like.

Difficult product program to learn. Like you're an actual illustrator. So maybe you can see this more. It confounds me. but it doesn't seem like the natural, there's no like natural teen version of it. Like, right? Like there's a natural, like, Premier Rush is like the easier version of Premiere for creators.

Like, I mean, the easier version of Illustrator is Spark. You think so? Yeah, I think so because you think about this way, of all the people out there that want to make a flyer or design a poster or do something like that, they'll search and they have two options. They can download a product like Illustrator and learn it and then make a poster or whatever they have their mind's eye, or they can start with the template and then just edit it to achieve what they want. And there's really two sites of customers. I think that there were a lot of people before we

offered Spark and before there were products like Canva in the world who just, you had to learn an illustrator or good luck. Like there was nothing else you could do. Now you at least have a choice. I can start with something templated and work and be creative within the confines of those within those constraints or I can learn a product of the illustrator. I think Illustrator and iPad will lower the buried entry. I think it'll be a lot easier to use. When I got the product demo and I saw it in action, it actually did seem easier to pick up on iPad than it does to learn it on desktop. And I do have a personal experience with Premiere Rush. And I was trying to make a vlog for my new YouTube channel. How long ago is this, by the way? This was, um, it went on two weeks ago,

like a week ago. Okay. So the recent version of Rush. Yeah. So I was trying to upload all my footage from my iPhone onto Premiere Rush, and then I wanted to tweak it a little bit more, maybe how I wanted to make it with titles and stuff. So I was going to try to import it into Premiere Pro. And then, like, the cloud syncing, like, it wasn't working for me. And I would, like, open it up on, I would open up Premiere Rush on desktop. And it, like, wasn't working for me for some reason. So then I just imported all of my clips to the desktop, and I just worked directly from Premiere Pro.

So, like, the lesson that I'm... You're brave. I mean, what I'm trying to, I mean, it was actually a learning experience for me. I had a lot of fun learning and watching YouTube tutorials, but I do think it's a good thing that Premier Rush was there, even though, like, it didn't exactly work for me in the way that it was intended to. Yeah. But it did lead me to Premier Pro. Well, with my tech support had on, maybe you had, you know, sync over Wi-Fi only and not cellular. I don't know.

I had no. Yeah, so I didn't even know that was a thing. It could be. Sometimes people get tripped up on that one, including me. But we purposely made Premier Rush work with Premier Pro. You can go up. And the reason is because, to your point, some people, you know, they geek out, they make something amazing in Premier Rush. And they're like, but there's this one thing I want to do.

And I'm willing to go to Premier Pro and learn a little bit in order to achieve it. And that's actually great because that's how people become pros. Yeah. You want that path of migration. So that path, we were talking a lot before you came on, that path used to exist very clearly. Right. You use Imovie. It came for you with your Mac. You want to do more than Imovie can do. Now you've got a choice between Premiere and Final Cut. Almost everybody picks you guys, except for the five people who pick Final Cut. I would say that's the right choice. Yeah, I figured you'd say that. But you've got that path with Photoshop in many cases. You have that path with a lightroom. You can just sort of see it. Here's a set of tasks that look like the thing you're doing, but you want to do more. And that's really what you've been talking about this whole time. But you do. do not have that path from the TikTok editor. You do not have that path from the Instagram Stories Editor, which are, like you said,

designed for a much more mass consumer. How do you do that education? I mean, a lot of it is through people's desires that end up yielding searches with verbs. Yeah. That land on pages of our products. So we see a real rise in the inorganic, sorry, the organic search terms. Sorry, the non-branded search terms is the right term. Yeah.

where people are just saying, hey, make YouTube channel art. Yeah. And they want to do something incredible for their YouTube channel, and they will land, and either the answer is Illustrator or Spark or something like that, or they want to add a title sequence, you know, add new font to TikTok video, and then we just capture it. So it's an interesting nuance of our business now is to make sure that we understand whatever these customers want to do, specifically to the platforms, right?

Yeah. And if you think about it, we've always considered our platforms to be platforms like Mac and Windows. But it's actually now Mac, Windows, Instagram, Snapchat. I mean, these are all TikTok. These are all platforms. They need to have their own export flows. Some of them have proprietary formats. They have different styles.

They have unique format constraints. And actually some features, like, for example, auto reframe that we launched in Premier Pro, and we are bringing to Premier Rush. what Auto Refram does is it takes the video that you shot and it automatically keeps the subject in it but for different sort of sizes and widths and it's actually a very cumbersome thing for any video editor to do. How do you stay in the frame

for a Snapchat vertical versus a YouTube horizontal? And so we'll just do that automatically for our customer. And I think it's things like that that will make us a really great partner to those platforms and the creators on them. I think that they will increasingly have like third party tools that they'll bring in. And I think there's only so much complexity they will go natively because they want to stay accessible to everyone. Otherwise, a lot of product kicks in and a new

product creeps up and competes with them. You know, we talked a lot about platforms. The classic platform relationship, I think, exists is the one that everyone has with YouTube, right? And they seem to be the only platform that hasn't built an ecosystem of tools. They seem very content. I mean, they've tried, but they seem very content to let you. and some other folks just provide video editing tools for YouTube creators. Is that something that you talk to them about? Is that something that you, right? Like, YouTube has styles.

It has moments. It does, is that a market for you, like, distinct from everything else? Or is that, well, we're here, we're winning. We're just not going to overthink it. I mean, our conversations with platforms like YouTube are typically around, how do we make it easier for our customers to publish and distribute their content to your platform? How can they do so from within the console of the product?

Also, if they're publishing to, five different platforms, how do we make it easier for the customer to do that? Now, it's not in their interest in their own experience to also let you publish to Facebook or whatever, but we're a platforming gnostic company. I mean, we want to enable people to push their content everywhere as seamlessly as possible and to also customize each format to be optimal for the said platform. And I think that as more platforms happen and more nuances are built into them, that's great for Adobe because that's more reason for you to need our tools. as opposed to natively create in Snapchat, where you can only publish just Snapchat.

If you're a legitimate brand or even a media influencer or just someone who's super active on social, you are on three different platforms. So why wouldn't you want to use a platform agnostic tool and publish everywhere? Yeah. So I want to end on like a larger philosophical question. We've taught a lot about stuff you are building, stuff you're going to build, things you want to build. Is there a level of stuff that you won't build? I'm like in the deep fake zone, in the fake voices zone.

You obviously have the capability. We've seen... With Adobe Sneaks, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that historically, anything that we have ever built, I mean, there are other versions out there, right? Yeah. And so what we are focusing on now is the attribution model and building a way for people to...

First of all, people have always wanted attribution for their work because it's how they get jobs. So, like, one thing creatives all want, for the most part, unless they have, like, some form of anonymous account or they're doing something. bad is they want attribution for their work. And we've just never built that into the tools. You've never been able to actually click on something you've used somewhere and see who actually created it. Now there's an interesting opportunity to do that because people want to see how something was edited in order to determine whether or not they can trust it. And I think that we learn from, and it's not perfect, but the notion of verified accounts for people to determine

whether they can trust something has been helpful. Now, it doesn't mean that what you're reading is true. It just means that you're reading it from a verified source. So it gives you some determination of whether this is some random person in their bedroom somewhere making up something or if this is someone or some entity that's known that some company took the pain to verify. And so we're trying to figure out, and this is where we launched the content authenticity initiative, is there some open source way of including the attribution of a piece of work? and with that any like changes that had been made that people if they opt in to want to enclose that in the payload so to speak you know how can we partner with others to expose that to folks who want to see it and so that's been this that's been like our approach to this whole deep fake problem is well listen if we can help every creative tool on the planet allow people to attach their name to their content if they want or even say it's anonymous but it's verified and then let someone click in further and see the edits they made. So if it's a Photoshop image, that doesn't mean that it's faked. It just

means that it was touched up potentially. Yeah. And so if you can just click and actually see the original or see what was made, then you can make the determination. Like, I think that needs to exist. So that idealistically sounds exactly correct and good. What I worry about is like, unless you're talking about some crazy blockchain stuff, which maybe you are. Yeah. There's no way to do that without a server that's in charge somewhere that is owned by somebody. right so you open the image you i think you partner with new york times and twitter yep so the flow you're describing tell me if i'm getting it wrong well it's actually in the it can be in the asset itself right well sure but you're describing a new york times photographer Doug mills takes a photo

president that gets published for the new york times it's got this tag it says Doug mills took this photo um it's a journalistic photo it was not edited this is rod out the camera then it goes on twitter and you can see it on twitter like okay here's the chain unless that is unbreakable is bit, you still need to verify it, right? You need to like encrypt it and check it or something has to happen to say this checkmark is real. Otherwise, somebody could fake it, which is even worse. Right. It's an even bigger problem. Well, I think there either needs to be a source of truth, you know, of if an edit is made to an asset that was verified, like what edits need to be recorded somewhere. Yeah. But I think there could potentially be a blockchain solution to

this. I mean, in fact, tomorrow there actually is the first meeting of the content authenticity initiative participants, including New York Times and Twitter, and then tons of other folks we invited from different brands and other creative tools and whatever else. And everyone's kind of coming together to say, you know, what would this attribution model look like? You know, how do we store this information? All that kind of stuff. But, yeah, it needs to be done in a way where you can at least trust whether something

was made by someone who is authenticated, like is an entity or not, whether you can trust the attribution and whether you can trust the edit, the edit, death. Yeah. And I think it's akin to kind of like camera, the X-DIF, you know, information that associates itself with an image from any sort of camera. That could also be a model that we could use. You can edit X-F whenever you want. I think that's like the thing that worries me is at first blush, the simplest way to build it kind of looks exactly like a DRIM. Well, you can edit it. You can edit it afterwards, right? But you always have the diff of what the original one was when it was actually created. And if you can connect the two, then you always see what was changed.

But a bad actor is not going to respect the fact that... Right. I mean, you're trying to protect against bad people. Well, I think that the bad people are not going to buy in any of this. Like, the bad people are just going to do what they want to do, and they're not going to do any attribution, and they're certainly not going to opt in to share all of their edits and store them somewhere as a source of truth. But that's the point is that I think that as you start to call out the good actors of the world who opt in to something like that are willing to take attribution for their work, then we will cast some shadow of doubt over things that are non-attributed.

And I think that's probably like a healthy human impulse. I mean, if you go back to when people first heard, like, War of the Worlds on the radio. Yeah. And, you know, and they didn't know if it was real or not. And then they learned, oh, wait, actually, it's a medium that people can storytell on. And the same thing happened with TV, by the way. Like, people have always, with new technology emerges, they've always wondered, oh, goodness. Like, what are we going to do?

I mean, I love these, like, early newspapers around the horseless carriages, aka cars. When they came out, everyone was like, oh, my God, we're all going to die. And, you know, I mean, cars are dangerous. But I just think we learn as people in society to build crosswalks, to build signs, to have traffic laws. I mean, and it's our responsibility to partake in this conversation. Do you think this is something that you need to do before, I don't know, the federal government passes a deepfakes law? I don't think about Adobe in the context of regulation a lot. Like, if you're an Amazon executive, I'd be like, are you for earning the government?

That's not usually the conversation we have, but this is like right in that. I mean, the crazy thing is that, I mean, I'm not even. familiar with what a deface law would be. But it's like if you're if you were ever to say, hey, you can no longer, you know, do something extreme, but you can no longer Photoshop something. Yeah. Right. Then guess what? There will be like dark web utilities that everyone's using that will truly have no attribution. Yeah. And will be actually made for bad people, which is not good. Yeah. So I don't think anyone wants to do that. I don't know if you've seen this new thing that Instagram started doing, but they're starting to flag like Photoshop

images that have some sort of like fact-checking article link to it. And it kind of requires you to like, it gives you a choice like, oh, do you want to click through to like see this image? And then you click on it and it's like, oh, actually this photo is not like Death Valley. It's like a Photoshop image. Do you think that's kind of like the right way to go about it? I think that there's different attacks to this. There's the algorithms attack, which is a bit of a cat and mouse game, but it's still important.

I mean, you do need algorithms that can determine whether something's been edited, whether something, you know, can be trusted, whether a link is malicious. I mean, all those things exist. And then, of course, the bad actors out there will try to outmaneuver them. And then the algorithms will learn from that, and then they'll get better. So that is an important part of the puzzle. I don't think that it's the only solution. Listen, we're going to not know in video whether something was taken out of it. We're not going to know whether something you hear me say right now was literally written into a computer, and it sounds like I just said it. I mean, we're just, we're not going to know any of that in the future. The technology art exists in many companies, by the way, to do this stuff.

So we need to start to know where the media is coming from in order to truly, you know, make a major decision based on what we're reading or watching. When do you think that's going to have an average? First meeting tomorrow, so I'm sure there's no fixed timeline, but what are you hoping? Yeah. No, I mean, I think that, I mean, I personally, and I'll just speak for myself, like, I want to start to test some of this attribution-driven a model in content creation by the end of this year. I want to have some experiment or test live because I always believe you have to chip early and sometimes I get in trouble for this.

But you've got to get out there and you've got to get people's feedback and you've got to build things alongside customers to know as opposed to us triangulating, you know, privately in our labs and then hope that people get it and use it. It's never going to work that way. All right. Last question. I'm asking everybody this this year. Yeah.

There's nothing to do. Like you're a busy guy. You're like worried about how. content attribution, you're looking at resource maps for your teams. When do you work? When do you sit down alone and like produce work? Oh gosh. I love this question because I do a lot of travel between New York and San Francisco, as I mentioned to you when we were sitting down earlier. And everyone I know says to me, oh my gosh, it must be so horrible. Like you have this long commute. You're on the road almost every week or every other week. I actually, I have two blocks of five

hours in the sky where I get to actually sketch and think of little ideas to solve problems. And I get to sit back and think about maybe we could try this this way or that way. And as we all know, like when you hit the ground, you hit the ground running and your phone's blowing up and your meetings are back to back and everything. We're so like optimized these days. Yeah. I think that's why I keep asking that question because I don't know when I work. We are in a war of this era is all about productivity versus creativity.

And I think that the playbook for decades past has been, let's just make everyone more productive. Let's give them email and Microsoft Word and, you know, task management systems and project management tools. Like, we're just going to make you more and more and more and more productive and not waste a minute of your time. And then we've, like, over-optimized ourselves on productivity to the point where now, what do robots and algorithms and AI? That's all about productivity. Yeah. So we've, like, optimized humans to do the things that actually technology will be the best to do. and the only thing that only humans can do is be creative.

And I really mean that. Like I think that creativity comes from childhood trauma, mistakes of the eye, edges that become centers, who knows why. But I think that's one of the rallying cries for me personally with our work at Adobe. It's like we got to outfit the rest of the world for creativity because otherwise what are kids going to do? Yeah. You know, what are people going to do to stand out and keep jobs and have productive lives? But I also think it's about like that time, making that time to be creative as opposed to just,

constantly trying to be more productive. I think you're the third person who's like, I got to be in a plane with shitty Wi-Fi. Yeah. There's something that is like at once like, okay, that's, it feels like the right answer because your connectivity is low, so it's just like a forcing function. It's also like a deeply depressing answer that I, the fact that I've heard it so many times, it's like, I do all my thinking on planes now. And it's like, you know, that plane Wi-Fi's going going to get better. Maybe we're going to have like Wi-Fi free rooms in our homes that have like metal walls and people have talked about it. What are they called? Something Chamber. We're like, Faraday cages.

Fairday cages, exactly, where we're going to have to go in there and meditate and think about the future. Yeah, it's fairday.com. We've got an installment plan. We send you a new one every couple weeks. Great. It's a real recurring revenue bundle that we're doing. I got all my ideas from you. No, I mean, that to me is like, it's the question, I think, of this moment.

Like, I am really bad at context switching. And I don't know. You do a lot of it. You do more than me. And I'm all, I'm just, I'm asking everybody because hopefully somebody can tell me something I can use. What if disconnection is the competitive advantage of the 21st century? Wow. See, that's why I want you here. That's like the TED Talk I'm looking for.

We don't have any more time. Let's you go for an hour. All right, Scott. Thank you so much, man. Thanks for having me, guys. Great conversation. All right, my thanks to Scott Belski for joining me and Dami on this episode of The Rochcast. A great conversation. We'll be back later this week with the chat show.

And the next Tuesday, we got Brian Seleski. He's the CEO of Argo AI talking about self-driving cars. That was a really good one, too. Stay tuned for that.