Adobe targets school kids to get them hooked on software

I MEET MEGAN at an industrial estate near Heathrow Airport. It's in the back of beyond and, with grim humour, the locals have dubbed this bleak landscape Stockley Park.

Megan seems like any ordinary middle class young woman. Once, she dreamed of being an architect. She ended up drifting into the IT industry, where she fell in with the wrong crowd, and starting running with some software salesmen.

Despite this, Megan still seems charming and pleasant. But beneath her cool facade, she's hatching a fiendish plot.

She plans to infiltrate our schools, get our children hooked on her 'apps' (street slang) then put the kids to work, so she can sell them stronger versions, at a street price of hundreds of pounds. The apps have cool names like Flash and Flex, which mask the evil uses they will be put to. Such as creative corporate presentations that make many lose the will to live.

Megan is over here, making contacts. Soon she will head back to her base, in Adobe's offices, in California.

Adobe is where the ‘apps' are manufactured. These apps that have the power to make images appear before our children's eyes. "There were all these, like, stars, and they were rotating. It really captured my attention," said Nigel, 14, hardly more than a child, but with the vacant expression of a man who has spent hours looking at a screen. Nigel has now discovered he needs glasses.

Megan said if we came back on the 27th, she could get us some apps. "I can do you Flash, Flex and Fireworks, or bundle them as a package," she leered. "I can't give you exact details yet, but I can promise cheap licences."

Looking both ways, she said she couldn't tell us any more, for fear of “Ann Embargo”. Though a high ranking Adobe member, she is not top of the hierarchy. "Put is this way, she doesn't have the best desk in Adobe," said one girl, who wanted to be known only as Firefly.

One man gave testament to the astonishing power that Megan can command. "Five years ago, everyone used Quark," said Subhas Patel, CEO of training company Harlequin Solutions, “then it took a total caning. No one asks for it anymore."

Megan unashamedly owned up to this. It was a plot she hatched when running a gang called Macromedia, which later got absorbed into the Adobe firm. "Yeah, that was me. The scheme worked really well, so I'm going to do it all again," she leered.

After repeating her warning that details of her plot were blocked by embargo, Megan suddenly softened. "Do you want some betas? I can get you some betas. You don't have to pay me," she said.

We refused her disgusting offer, made our excuses and left.

Adobe is launching some kind of cheap schools software package on March 27th. µ