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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."
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), then you would react in such a non-sensical way to sudden competition. First post?
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.
It's similar to Microsoft's excuse for dropping IE for Mac. If you don't want to support Mac, then just don't support it. Don't blame it on competition when your product has been superior for years and recognized as such. If it's not selling well, reduce the price to sell more. If the Apple market is just too small, say so.
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=3976#11
XP comes with Windows Movie Maker. How can Adobe compete with that!?
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.
- tristan
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.
Please help metamoderate.
Adobe isn't talking about competing with iMovie, which is bundled for free - but rather referring to competing with Final Cut Pro (and Express) which are 999 and 249 respectively.
I'm sure Apple has known about this for some time. FCP Express was certainly a shot across the bow of Adobe (because of its power for the price).
It looks like Adobe felt it couldn't compete with FCP for whatever reason, so it decided to throw in with Intel/Microsoft and support their hardware and media technologies, respectively.
I think this has been expected in the Mac world for some time - the writing has been on the wall.
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...
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Microsoft drops Mac IE development as Safari reaches 1.0
Of course, anyone who wants to develop Office-like business software or any kind of web browser for Windows faces the same uphill battle. When the OS manufacturer makes non-OS software, they enjoy unparalleled integration with the rest of the system and anyone else comes in four to six months behind the development curve.
It's sad that third parties stop developing Mac software because Apple's doing it better, but it's no more fatal -- to businesses or to consumers -- than it has been on Windows. When Microsoft took over the Windows office software market, developers either died or moved onto a different software niche. Same happens on Mac OS. Such is business.
video editing for 3D and animation classes. But now Final Cut Pro is the default standard for film schools and most animation courses. The thing is, Adode has seriously lagged the last couple of releases with Premiere. Adobe had a lead for a long time and simply let the advantage go. Nothing remains constant and innovation requires a sense of pressure and urgency. It looks like Adobe didn't have a sense of urgency until it was too late.
All Adobe is saying is "we're not going to compete in a market where we'll be soundly trounced."
By the way, Acrobat sucks pretty bad on OS X. Most people use Preview instead of Reader. Creation of pdf files is as easy as hitting "Print", then "Save as PDF", which takes away much of the need for the full version of Acrobat.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
What I don't get is why it is that when this came up, and when the whole IE thing came up, people seem to occationally somehow think it's harder to compete against Apple than against a different third-party.
Why?
I don't see what Apple's advantage is. All of their apps have gone through public, well-documented (okay, and in some cases not-so-well-documented, but they're working on that) APIs; there's nothing hidden. There have even been a couple cases where widgets and classes used in iApps have been later migrated into the main Cocoa API (like the itunes search system or "that switcher thing") because apple thought they might be useful to developers. The only real advantage Apple's had is that they've taken advantage of new APIs immediately, whereas other companies don't like saying "you have to upgrade to Panther to use this app". I went to the WWDC, and it really seems like Apple hasn't done anything anyone could have done; in fact, they actually had one session where they used Safari as a case study, showing how they used performance testing tools in making Safari so other people could do the same.
Don't say it's because Apple can use the money from their OS/computer business to unfairly finance other things; Apple is clearly understaffed and Adobe probably has more loose change than Apple. And I seriously doubt it's becuase of the expertise and access to engineers that comes from being in the same building as the Quicktime engineers. If Adobe's support contract didn't give it roughly the same degree of access, they would be able to bitch and moan about that specific problem and there would be a big community backlash.. there's worry already about apple's new presence in the applications area and a perception that apple is giving its own engineers preferential treatment could hurt them kind of badly.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Hidden, unpublished APIs?
Have you even looked at the latest FireWire SDK?
Or QuickTime?
Or WebKit?
Or CoreAudio?
Or iMovie Plugin?
Or Image Capture?
Or Information Access Toolkit?
Or the rest of the Cocoa and Carbon APIs?
After you've written something that has exhausted the possibilities in those APIs,
then you might have a reason to gripe, but until then, you're just spreading FUD.
A similar article here. Bottomline, after reading the 2 articles: Adobe is very sensitive about direct competition from Apple. Adobe also fears that Apple might one day start giving away Pro applications for free, which is not entirely impossible because Apple is still mainly a hardware manufacturer. What, about 75% revenue from hardware sales?
Another reason stated in the article on Digital Video Editing is:
This announcement seems to follow a consistent trend at Adobe: none of the applications in the digital video editing segment get an OS X version Encore DVD, Audition, now Premiere gets the axe, when will After Effects get the boot?
"It usualy starts with some screaming. Afterwards there is much running around."
Ehh, FinalCut is a better product. It has a much better UI, handles 24p h4 video perfectly, and does quite few things that Premiere needs 3rd party hardware to accomplish. Moreover, FinalCut on a PowerBook is typically a much more robust portable solution the Premiere on a PC laptop.
FinalCut's video/audio solutions have surpassed that of Premiere's during the past two major releases. Over the past 12 months FinalCut has become -the- pro video editing solution for MacOSX.
Honestly, it makes no sense to keep selling Premiere on OS X. Adobe would be loosing money. Now that FinalCut's feature set is mature, Mac user are migrating away from Premiere. Furthermore, a lot of Digital Video folks are migrating to OS X simply to use Final Cut or Final Cut Express.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
You ARE wrong. FCP came from Macromedia, who had pinched Premiere's lead programmers to produce a Premiere killer (that's why FCP is so Premiere like - it IS "Super Premiere"). Macromedia had let the project founder, Apple bought it back to life.
Now, Adobe has finally admitted defeat. The Premiere killer has killed.
That was classic intercourse!
Final Cut Pro is the Premier-killer application and it's been pillaging Premier for some time. It's gotten to the point that Apple has released FCP 4 but Adobe still doesn't have a reply to FCP 3. Remember, FCP has been taking the pro market by storm even at twice what Premier costs. With Final Cut Express undercutting Premier's price, Adobe has decided to take their ball and run home before Apple shuts them out entirely.
I mean, even Avid is restructuring their marketing strategy and slashing prices because of the heat they're feeling from Final Cut Pro. What's a long-in-the-tooth, klunky program like Premier to do in the face of this competition?
From what I understand, Premier is not really competitive on the PC side, either, with several programs having more features and better interface. The PC market is larger and more fragmented, though, so they it's more economical for them and less embarrassing. (I.e., on the Mac side, a single opponent came from nowhere, kicked sand in their face, took their girlfriend, and has been voted "Most eligible Editor on the beach".
All of the video editors I know hate Premier, which is so primitive and klunky. I mean, this is the 2000's and it can still only have a single timeline per project file?
As far as I can tell, Premier's user base is: 1) people who have been using it forever, 2) novices who recognize the brand name and have read over the years about Premier, or 3) those who got it free with a bundled purchase.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.