Brodie Ford

Yeah, well, Shantanu was a legend, right?

I mean, he was in that seat for 18 years, and he gets a lot of credit for turning Adobe from a company where you just buy Photoshop or another product one time to one of these recurring subscription businesses that is just the norm now, but at the time was quite novel.

But at the end of the day, I think he was seen as a CEO of that era, right?

In the AI era, a lot of these SaaS companies are needing to undergo a transition or reinvention.

And it appears that here the board or somebody decided that he might not have been the right person to lead that transition.

People are using AI within Adobe products, but the big risk for them is that the cost of content creation has gone down a lot.

A lot of the hit creative programs are not made by Adobe, right?

I mean, Adobe's valuation for a long time was based on being really kind of the only game in town if you were a professional.

And every day that becomes a little less true.

And that's what they have to reckon with.

It's quite similar to a lot of the big SaaS names, whether it be Workday or Salesforce, that they're seeing steady growth, slight deceleration, some uptick of their AI products.

But at the end of the day, it's just not enough to convince investors that AI will be an additive and not a competitive force against their business.

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Exactly.

Right now, it's all about, as you both said, that execution risk.

I mean, we have to remember that Oracle was kind of the poster child for Wall Street getting scared about all these big data centers not going quite right or the margins being upside down.

But the results last night gave a lot of comfort, right?

Yeah, for sure.

I think the big question underlying a lot of it is how are the big builds going, right?