Alex and the team at Adobe asked Matthew to work with their global teams to re-imagine the future of the humble but ubiquitous document, and the PDF, of which there are apparently more than 80 Trillion today, with many more to come.
Adobe is the outstanding market leader in open format documents as well as collaboration and design software, and almost anyone who uses a computer knows its products. Yet re-imagining the document is possibly one of the hardest tasks there is: documents are almost as old as the human race itself, and every enterprise company on Earth has at some point tried to put its own spin on them and dominate the space.
"When you dig into the space you realise just how many different document formats and use cases have already disappeared thanks to the advance of new technologies."Matthew Griffin, United States, December 2022
Matthew pointed out that while the market for PDFs is growing almost exponentially, many document formats and use cases have already disappeared as new technologies advance. HTML 5 is replacing design documents, smart contracts are replacing traditional contracts, and immersive technologies are reinventing CAD and BIM systems as well as education and training applications.
He also set out the opportunities to re-imagine documents, from biometrics for user identification and authentication to new AI and Web 3.0 tools that could transform how documents are created, collaborated on, distributed and mined. The detailed sessions were held behind closed doors, so their specifics remain private.
