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Cringely Posits Adobe's Purchase by Apple
An anonymous reader writes to mention another Robert Cringely piece discussing Apple's future. In his latest article, he lays out some goals for Apple on its quest to desktop dominance. An important link in this chain is Apple's purchase of Adobe Systems. From the article: "Adobe has already made one feint away from Mac development that required personal pressure from Steve Jobs on John Warnock to reverse. If Apple kinda-sorta embraces Windows enough for Adobe to question whether continued development for the native OS X platform is still warranted, well, then Apple WILL just become another Dell, which isn't what Steve Jobs wants. Steve wants Windows applications to run like crazy on his hybrid platform but to look like crap. In his heart of hearts, he'd still like to beat Microsoft on the merits, not just by leveraging some clever loophole. So he needs the top ISVs who are currently writing for OS X to continue writing for OS X, and that especially means Adobe."
Cringely, or at least this one, does not work for Infoworld. The column is on the NPR website.
Yeah, it actually is :)
This isn't how transactions work in public financial markets. It would cost Apple BILLIONS of dollars in stock and cash and/or debt in some combination to acquire Adobe friendly takeover or not. Adobe is a publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders. The board has a LEGAL obligation to the shareholders. They can't just hand over the company to Apple and print new certificates even if for some INSANE reason they wanted to in the interest of a "friendly" merger.
The only way shareholders would approve a buyout is if it was at a significantly higher price than where Adobe currently trades (which as mentioned is $23.65 billion). Unless the fortunes of the overall stock market, or Adobe change dramatically, it will cost Apple a hell of a lot to acquire Adobe, friendly takeover or not.
Even in an all stock transaction, existing Apple shareholders would pay for the transaction, as the value of their shares would be heavily diluted (new shares would be issued, making each existing share worth less).
Adobe would cost about $25 billion, or so, with $4-5 billion in sales; Apple's cap is around $60 billion with about $20 billion in sales...... Apple can clearly afford it but it is not clear that Adobe is a key to the future, the future is probably more in the media center thingie......
If Apple has access to the API as Cringley has stated in his past two articles, Apple in theory could enable OSX to launch WinXP apps inside a process similar to how it ran "Classic Mode" for OS9 apps.
.NET CLR
In theory, yes. In practice, the Win32 API is very, very big. If you want any kind of application compatibility, you need to implement:
- OLE / COM / DCOM
- MFC
- DirectX (DirectShow, DirectPlay, Direct3D, etc.)
- The
- Internet Explorer (many apps depend on it)
- 100s of standard controls (e.g. ListView, etc)
- The Registry
- User Profiles
The Wine project knows just how difficult this is. There's nothing magic about having API documentation - it's still a huge amount of reimplementation and compatibility work to create a product that is probably less compatible than Windows Vista will be (which runs most Windows 95 apps fine).
First of all, how does this help classify and search the articles? It doesn't, if every third article is "evil" and "troll".
Secondly, please refresh your memory of what a "troll" is. Here is the official Slashdot definition. Just because you think an article or comment is wrong and stupid does not make it a "troll". A "troll" is purposeful malicious misdirection intended to lead the discussion astray. Just because you disagree with Cringely, Dvorak, et al (and think they are totally off the wall), it does not mean they are trolls. They may indeed be stupid, but they are not trolls. Any opinion presented constructively is not a troll, even if it is wrong.
As far as I am concerned, the "tagging beta" should filter out all the "troll", "stupid", "evil", "FUD", and other non-helpful tags, because they are not objective descriptions to classify the article, but only negative opinion (and I think we can all read and form our own opinions).
Quite ineffective, given that there are no ads on Cringely's page.
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
This would be the perfect deal. And then the sweet "sorry, we're cancelling Photoshop for Windows since there is no demand for a PC version".
While that would be sweet revenge, Adobe switched a while back from developing Photoshop in Code Warrior on a Mac, and then porting to Windows, to developing Photoshop in Visual Studio on a PC, and porting to Mac.
Cutting the Windows version of Photoshop would be rather painful transition of their code-base at this point.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Mods on LSD. That's not insightful, and it's not even particularly funny if you have any idea what the term 'the editorial we' means.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060427. html is the Public Broadcasting Service, a completely diferent organization then Infoworld or National Public Radio.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.