Update: Here are Mike Chambers’ thoughts on the issue…

I thought it was a bad April fool’s joke at first, but it’s not April. It’s true, Adobe is laying off 8% of their global workforce, which is about 600 employees. More details will be available on Dec 16th during their regular earnings conference call. The full Adobe press release can be found here. Adobe’s president and CEO, Shantanu Narayen, said this is primarily because of not so good CS4 sales.Further, he states, “The global economic crisis significantly impacted our revenue during the fourth quarter, we have taken action to reduce our operating costs and fine-tune the focus of our resources on key strategic priorities.”

According to his twit, the layoffs include Mike Downey, Sr. Product Manager @ Adobe and a very influential evangelist for the platform. I am very sad to hear this news and will definitely miss his contributions. Their have been rumors that Mike Chambers and Ryan Stewart were both getting cut as well, but luckily, this is false and false.

I have heard multiple people make comments like, ‘for the first time, I am losing faith in Adobe and their stability.’ We have seen many industries take a hit during this recession, it should not be surprising that Adobe is one of them. However, the internet is not going to suddenly vanish due to our economy. Until Silverlight becomes a real competitor, Flash has no threat of dissappearing any time soon. Neither is the marketing industry going away. As long as their is marketing and 2d graphic design, there will be Photoshop and Illustrator. Adobe’s staff will shrink and it may yet shrink again after this round of layoffs is all said and done, but the company is not going away and their flagship products will not go away.

I am less concerned about the possibility that the next version of  Flash or Photoshop may take extra long to be released, and I’m more concerned about the jobs and families of the 600 that got laid off. Say a prayer that they are able to find another job, soon…