Adobe swapped Shantanu Narayen for Anil Chakravarthy. Both ran enterprise software. Both have engineering degrees. Both probably get asked to fix printers at family gatherings.
Narayen spent thirteen years turning Photoshop into a subscription service that charges you monthly to remove red-eye from photos you took in 2009. Revolutionary stuff. He announced his departure last March, which gave the board eighteen months to find someone who could also make creative professionals pay forever for software they used to own.
They picked Chakravarthy. He ran Adobe's Digital Experience business, which is what corporations call the thing that tracks everywhere you click on a website so they can sell you dog food three seconds after you Google "is my dog dying." Before that he worked at other companies you've heard of but couldn't describe if someone put a gun to your head.
Retail traders are now frantically Googling whether this is bullish or bearish. They will read seven articles. They will watch four YouTube videos with titles like "ADBE CEO CHANGE: WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOUR CALLS." They will learn nothing. They will buy anyway.
The stock moved half a percent in after-hours trading, which means absolutely nothing but will generate forty-eight hours of content from people who get paid to pretend CEO changes matter. Narayen made Adobe worth $240 billion. Chakravarthy will either make it worth more or he won't. Your opinion on this has the same impact as your opinion on continental drift.
This is the most predictable executive transition in tech history. Big software company. Successful CEO retires. Board picks internal candidate who already runs half the business. Everyone acts surprised. No one is surprised.
Somewhere right now a day trader is calculating whether Chakravarthy's LinkedIn profile photo suggests bullish momentum, and that person votes.
Photo by Rubaitul Azad on Unsplash
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