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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.
XP comes with Windows Movie Maker. How can Adobe compete with that!?
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.
The comment on the article you linked suffers from a logical fallacy of false equivalence.
Apple has a 3% market share (it's actually closer to 8% total installed base, but for the sake of argument...) of all computers in existence.
Adobe does not sell Premier to all computers in existence. They sell to the video editing industry. In this industry, Apple has about a 70% market share.
So, obviously, market share is NOT the reason Adobe is dropping Mac support. The truth is, they can't compete with Final Cut Pro, so they've dropped their support for that platform and are concentrating on the minority platform where they still maintain the monopoly. If FCP were ever ported to Windows, Premiere would pretty much cease to exist as a product.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
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.
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!