Adobe Drops Mac Support For Premiere

Theaetetus writes "In a story on MacCentral, it's revealed that Adobe Systems is dropping support for the Mac in the new version of video editing app Premiere: 'If Apple's already doing an application, it makes the market for a third-party developer that much smaller,' said David Trescot, senior director of Adobe's digital video products group. In response to the news, Apple issued a statement welcoming Premiere customers to make the switch to the Mac and Final Cut Pro."

Comments

Cop-out?

[mwelty]

Post #1! This has become a very popular thing for developers to do nowadays...lost your will to innovate? Blame it on the other guy. What I don't understand is how this happens when it seems clear to me that people have learned to compete with Microsoft, arguably the most anti-competitive entity in the business, so why is it that they cannot compete with Apple, a company with significantly fewer software titles and an overwhelming demand for the portage of many common applications from the Win32 side of things? Just my two cents.

Adobe and Mac

[OmniVector]

I had the pleasure of sitting in on a "Q and A" session with an adobe rep, while I was at RIT. The rep (perhaps not the position of the entire company) basically didn't like the mac platform. He complained about how it was more to support, and changed more frequently than the windows counterpart. This of course costs them more in development and support. Granted this was not long after the OS 9 -> OS X transition, so of course adobe is going to bitch that the platform changes too much because they just dumped the whole API adobe products were based off of. Carbon helped fill this gap but it's by no stretch a the cure-all.

I wonder if this is the general feel of Adobe developers however.

Re:Adobe afraid of competition?

[kaszeta]

Well, it would have made more sense to have kept selling the product to Mac users until it was no longer profitable. As far as I knew, Premiere is still the most popular film editing app amongst Mac users,

I'm not too sure about this... Final Cut Pro has a pretty large userbase in the Mac world. I guess when you are used to being the only bully on the block, and have thus come to enjoy forcing people to pay your extremely high prices (since there isn't anywhere else to go)

This comment doesn't really apply, since 1. Adobe hasn't had a monopoly or near-monopoly on the Mac platform for quite some time (Final Cut in it's various flavors has been around a while), and 2. Final Cut Pro is actually more expensive than Adobe Premier.

Re:Adobe afraid of competition?

[alchemist68]

This is Adobe's way of punishing Apple for trouncing on their business. It also shows that Adobe will try to reclaim that lost Macintosh business on the Windows side of computing, by forcing those Mac users to purchase a Wintel PC to continue using Premiere. This stratedy has a two edged attack: 1. Adobe still keeps its business and 2. Adobe attempts to hinder Apple's hardware sales by forcing Mac users to the Dark Side into being assimilated as BORG DRONES.

Re:Adobe afraid of competition?

[rootofevil]

wouldnt it also force users to purchase an additional copy of premier (pc version) in order to keep using it?

then people would have to decide between changing platforms or changing programs. and to someone who is well acquainted with premier on a mac, neither choice looks very rosy i think.

Yawn

[SuperBanana]

Who cares? Adobe, like Microsoft, is slowly being made a moot point on the Macintosh platform. Adobe- like Microsoft, has always had the "you should be grateful to be doing business with us" kind of attitude. As the story poster says- Apple says "sure, come on over Adobe users!"

I worked at a company that did plugin development for Premier and After Effects- and not a day went by without Adobe getting pissed off about something. They'd accuse the their 3rd-party plugin development community of giving out prereleases. They'd "change their mind" about giving the company developer licenses. They were constantly getting upset about the slightest things developers or marketing people said at tradeshows. Each little temper-tantrum from Adobe would take hours of people's time to "fix"(fix being "kiss adobe ass until they're happy".)

The funny thing is that when you act like that, everyone else puts up with it, but slowly works to make you irrelevant. This former employer is doing great business with Apple- their plugin is included with every copy of Final Cut Pro, and while I was still there, I never heard a bad word about relations with Apple.

Re:Adobe afraid of competition?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe is probably doing something very stupid. While products released should be profitable, even if they are break even, if you have an assortment or portfolio of other popular packages for that platform, you end up hurting yourself.

imo, Adobe has 3 signature products--Photoshop, Acrobat, and Premiere. They just dropped one for Mac.

Furthermore, in some ways, this sends a negative signal regarding the potential of dropping other Mac products, no matter the PR spin on this. People will look elsewhere possibly sooner. Some will migrate to a wholly different platform (your 2nd point), x86 and MS OSs. However, Mac users tend to be a little more brand centric, so they will likely look to some other product sooner. If the company has shown one product may/will fail, what about the others? (If people perceive a bank to be unstable, even if it isn't, the bank may become unstable from such a fear.) Adobe Photoshop and similar products are stil quite popular and profitable for Adobe on OS X. Abandoning one of them sends a bad signal.

I wouldn't be surprised if downloads for the GIMP increased over the next few months for OS X users. The only problem with GIMP besides it being sometimes tempermental is, afaik, that it does not support commercial color syncing technology (like Pantone, stuff for digital commercial printing, since that tech tends to be heavily patented--please correct me if I'm wrong, since I'd like an alternative). That tech is something photoshop has, and is something most professionals find critical in their work.

Re:Here is why Adobe didn't port Premiere to Macs

[SuperBanana]

Here is why Adobe didn't port Premiere to Macs
This comment here explains the business situation fine:(link)

Interesting, except for the fact that the author(and you) don't use correct terminology. Premiere started as a Macintosh app, and always has been- it's never been "ported" to the Macintosh. Rather, it was "ported" to the PC.

Funny....

[rampant mac]

Funny how Adobe complains that the competition has cut into THEIR business. Isn't that the whole point of competition? Instead of making a better product, they whine and run away.

Welcome to life, Adobe. Innovate or die.

I'm certainly not saying that FCP is the be all, end all for video production (it isn't), but at least give it a chance, Adobe. Final Cut Express is lookin mighty fine right now...

Re:I can understand but....

[markv242]

Although Final Cut Pro may render things faster and all that, I like Adobe's take on user interface and sometimes, they do a better job than apple.

Premiere is well-known for having a convoluted interface (in respect to video slice-and-dice). Look at the Avid system, look at Final Cut Pro, then look at Premiere. Premiere has more in common with Photoshop than it does with the Avid, and (as much as people may hate to admit it) as Avid goes, so goes the industry.

What if at the office a user is running windows and Premier, wants to take the project home and only has his nice new dual 2ghz G5 sitting there.

Simple: one of your machines exports its edits into EDL, you transport your EDL file to your home, and you work on it from there. Why you would be running Windows and Premiere at the office is beyond me, though. That software is the buggiest, crash-prone POS that I've ever seen. I'd rather work with Vegas on Win32 than on Premiere. Granted, I'd pick FCP over both in a heartbeat.

Re:What I don't get

[TrancePhreak]

According to the article, Apple is dropping the API that Premiere was writtent in. In other words, Apple told them to get lost first.

Re:Adobe afraid of competition?

[afantee]

>> Rather than spend time and energy in a fight over the smaller Apple-based market, they're placing their resources in the much larger Windows arena, where there are greater prospects for growth.

The problem for Adobe is that Mac is actually a major platform for video editing and they are retreating to a smaller market because they don't know how to compete with Apple and Avid.

John Warnock could be such a crybaby. Literally.

[trudyscousin]

Stories such as this remind me of the time John Warnock stood before the attendees of a Seybold conference years ago and actually cried because Apple was threatening Adobe's PostScript font tech with its own TrueType. (Well, okay, I can't find any articles that back up my recollection, but perhaps that's what the author of this one meant by "visible dismay.")

In those days, Adobe had a stranglehold on the fonts market. Sure, there were players such as Bitstream and Agfa, but nothing compared to Adobe and the huge fees it was collecting per font. Then came Apple (along with Microsoft) who announced a competing technology that would be included with its operating systems, rather than as an add-on such as Adobe Type Manager, and if not make PostScript irrelevant, at least take a huge bite out of Adobe's margins. History tells us a truce was achieved, but at the time, my sympathy for Adobe was in the minus. Gouging your customers inevitably is bad business.

Now we have this. I personally haven't used Premiere in ages, and I can't say I know how it has evolved in the meantime. But while I was using it, I always had the unnerving feeling I was using a pee cee port that was an afterthought. A stagnant afterthought. (Not quite as bad as MS Word 6.0, but you get the idea.) After using FCP (and FCP Express), the question I have is: Why would I ever want to go back to Premiere?

Again, I'm thinking it's just desserts for Adobe. While I'm certain their reasons for redeveloping Premiere are exclusively retaliatory (just my opinion), Premiere is a fading star in as much the same way that Quark Xpress is. Ironic, in a way, that it's Adobe that's eating Quark's lunch.