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Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe
aabode writes "OSWeekly.com's Brandon Watts suggests that Apple should acquire Adobe. Why? 'While Apple has done a great job of developing media applications for beginners (the iLife suite is a good example of this), they could use a boost on the professional side. Granted, Final Cut Studio has become the standard when it comes to professional video editing, and Logic Studio is a great professional solution for editing audio, but what about the graphics and Web design segments of the market? If people want tools to support these interests on the Mac, then they turn to Adobe.'"
Quick numbers:
1. Apple has an operating income of $4.41 billion from a revenue of $24 billion
2. Abode Systems has a total revenue of $2.575 billion
3. Apple stock (AAPL) is listed at $187.97 a share
4. Adobe System has a share price of $47.69
I know these numbers aren't the whole story, or probably even half of it, but I think that it is clear Apple's worth is far greater then Adobe's. I believe they could afford to do such a buyout or a merger.
MOD PARENT UP
I don't really understand why it doesn't get more attention, but the Mac OS X Adobe Flash player has to easily be one of the worst pieces of software ever written.
CPU spikes up to 100% are common if a flash banner ad loads. Youtube will suck the life out of even a recent Core Duo Intel Mac. Loading a page on MySpace can sometimes render the system useless for a few minutes.
Thank God for FlashBlock.
Come to think of it, most of Adobe's codebase is very poorly supported on the Mac. Even Photoshop is starting to feel quite dated.
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This proposal isn't like most out there (small fry buying company 10 times their size, etc.) which are completely outside the realm of possibility.
ADBE's market cap is 16% (27 Billion) of AAPL's market cap (167 Billion). APPL has $15 Billion in cash on the books, so this couldn't be an all cash deal, but it could be a mix of stock and cash or an all stock deal.
It is worth considering an AAPL acquisition of ADBE. Of course, AAPL would have to offer a premium. If I was putting together the deal, I would offer 1 AAPL share for 4 ADBE shares and $10 a share in cash.
This would value ADBE at 46.75 + $10 = $56.75 a share. This is an 18% permium to today's price. That is a reasonable premium on ADBE's current valuation.
Yours,
Jordan
On OSX, you don't use adobe reader, you use the built in preview app which is Super Fast(TM) and Super Nice(TM) with PDFs. I wonder if it would be possible to make an efficient flash player too?
All of their new apps for OS X are supporting Intel Mac only, as opposed to "Universal binaries" that work with PPC Macs too
All is a bit strong a word. Some of their video apps are intel only (After Effects is Universal), all the rest (including all the apps from Design/Web collections) are universal.
That is irrelevant to any comparison between Mac and PC.
but their weak pathetic market share is the reason Adobe abandoned the platformInaccurate and inflammatory. Adobe has not abandoned the platform, they elected not to port Premier or Framemaker and have a few fringe apps that are Windows-only. Either that, or my recollection of having CS3 installed on my Mac at home is the result of delusional psychosis.
that seems like any investment in the platform is a waste of time and money.That is a baseless conclusion. I find it difficult to believe that it is a "waste of time and money" (i.e., an unprofitable endeavor), since they continue to make new versions of their core products for the Mac and show no signs of stopping.
Adobe has thrived after dumping Apple.Again, they only dumped support for a few major applications (good alternatives to which exist on the platform already), and secondly, I fail to see any causal link between the two.
Apple would buy a profitable Adobe, then just strap them into making software to stuff into Apple's $150 OSX service packs.I don't know if it's fair to call them service packs, because I was a lot more excited about any of them than XP SP2. Furthermore, that's an unreasonable conclusion. iLife is basically just Logic Pro Lite, Final Cut Pro Lite, a photo album and a web authoring tool. In the case of the professional apps, full versions do, in fact, exist. What would be more likely to happen in that situation is that every Adobe application would be forked into a home version and a pro version, just like with the other apps.
I basically agree that it's pointless for Apple to acquire Adobe, but your post was just littered with so many half-truths, twisted facts and blatant omissions that I had to break it down.
But Apple designed its own font architecture for System 7, which was released in 1992. This was the now-familiar TrueType. I'm not real clear on the details, but I guess Apple and Adobe couldn't agree on font architectures, with Adobe preferring to stick with its Postscript fonts, so Apple sold its stock in Adobe. If my memory is correct, they made $69 million.
Apple had at first announced that the Adobe Type Manager (ATM) software wouldn't work on System 7, as it was an extension, or "INIT", that installed a lot of patches in the OS. But after a widespread outcry, Apple relented and worked with Adobe to enable compatibility. Apple always hated INITs, as they prevented Apple from changing low-level APIs that would have broken the INITs' binary compatibility.
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The only CS3 apps that are intel mac only are the Video apps that had no Mac version of the previous generation. My assumption is they are reusing their SSE tuned code from the windows version since the error message is actually that the program requires SSE2.
BTW they do actually use xcode for the mac apps as of CS3.
http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/03/macintosh_and_t.html
Except that Leopard hasn't gone over to ZFS. It doesn't even support read-write access to ZFS. Why did so many pundits get it so wrong? Because Leopard introduces Time Machine, an automatic file versioning system, which is "obviously" built on top of ZFS's file versioning feature. Of course, if that were true, you wouldn't have to plug in an external disk to use Time Machine. But you do.
Going to ZFS in Leopard was the plan. Time Machine was originally designed around using ZFS. But, if you'll remember, Leopard was delayed a few months because of issues with ZFS, and decided to drop it for now. Full ZFS support is coming soon.
I was kind of excited when I heard about ZFS in OS X at first. And I was somewhat disappointed to hear it wasn't included in Leopard 10.5.0. But now I wonder why I cared. Time Machine exposes an interface that does what I need it to (without the hassle of using SVN or ZFS directly). Outside of specific circumstances, ZFS's real value to users is Time Machine.
Here's a tally of my local graphic arts/publishing/advertising-related colleagues (within a 10 mile radius of my ad agency), off the top of my head, based on my personal familiarly with the shop setups. I'm in a small suburban community just outside Dallas/Ft. Worth. Where I just list "Mac" or "Windows" it means that all the creative/graphic arts production computers are of that platform. Note that many of these companies (especially the newspapers) run other departments (such as Accounting) on other platforms.
1. Daily newspaper: 5 workstations. Mac
2. Daily newspaper: 4 workstations. Mac
3. Weekly newspaper: 4 workstations. 3 Macs, 1 Windows
4. Monthly magazine: 2 workstations. Mac
5. Print shop: 3 workstations. 2 Macs, 1 Windows
6. Print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
7. Weekly newspaper: 7 workstations. Mac
8. Print shop: 2 workstations. Mac
9. Design studio: 2 workstations. Mac
10. Commercial print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
11. PR agency, 2 workstations. Windows
12. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
13. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
14. Advertising agency (me). 5 workstations: 1 Linux, 1 Windows, 3 Macs.
Just as a note, the PR agency which has two Windows machines vends almost all of their graphic design work to other shops, although they tried real hard the first year in business to do all their design work in-house. The weekly newspaper which has the one Windows machine is finding that the Windows PC is currently being unused, although this changes from time to time depending on whether they have any designers currently employed who feel.
I used to do a detailed survey of graphic arts-related businesses and their platform choices for the Dallas/Ft. Worth area many years ago, generated by laboriously calling all 900+ businesses listed in the phone directories. The tally was always 98%+ in favor of Mac, but I haven't done the survey in years now. Anecdotally, I interface with some 50 other pre-press shops and publishing houses (where I send the ads I design for clients) and I still get the impression that the industry is overwhelmingly Mac. One reason this may be is that Windows has had some well-documented flaws in Microsoft's Postscript drivers (starting with WindowsXP) and also in the way Windows handles ICC color profile files. Several of the pre-press houses I deal with have Windows machines solely for the purpose of handling CorelDraw files from customers; the front-end machines to the imagesetters are invariably Mac.
I'm not sure who in the graphic arts industry is keeping platform talleys these days. Used to be that the PIA (Printing Industries of America) was a good source of information, along with Seybold Reports. I've had a Seybold subscription in recent years but not seen any hard stats on graphic arts platform usage.
Page layout app of choice still seems to be QuarkXPress over InDesign with about 60% of the market for those folks who do complex page builds with lots of text (newspapers and magazines, for example). InDesign seems to be rapidly catching up, however. Most popular vector program still seems to be Illustrator and, as always, Photoshop is the preferred bitmap editor.
Now, for Web work, however, where no cross-media placement is involved, Windows machines seem to dominate. This is just a guess, but I'd say that Windows has 80%+ of the local Web designers' platforms that I'm familiar with.
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All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
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