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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.'"
monopoly, it was real fun...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
...what they did with Emagic. Emagic Logic, lovely music sequencing program, worked on Windows and Macs. Apple buy them up, first thing they do, "sorry guys, its going Mac only".
Now, if they do that with Adobe software, what do you think will happen?
Pros and Cons:
Pros: establishes Apple as THE platform for photographers and designers by removing the Windows competition. Sure, Apple could continue to fund the development of Photoshop and Illustrator for Windows. But the latest and greatest version would always appear on the Macintosh first.
Cons: even with its current pile of money (iPhone and Ipod are two very successful products after all), I am not sure Apple has enough money to buy Adobe. Not to mention Microsoft would certainly file an anti-trust suit. It also raises all kind of legal snafus in Europe for instance, which would certainly frown upon it.
Cons: Postscript and PDF are both open standards. I am not sure I'd like to see Apple control their future.
So, yes, and interesting prospect. Still pretty unlikely, though.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
...how someone can suggest this when the most basic but most widely-used Adobe product, Flash player, is a giant flaming CPU-hogging turd in OS X.
Cause the writer of the article has stock in (company) and wants to make a quick buck...
I know I've seen this same headline with Nintendo there, and I can't help but think there've been others. I just don't care enough to search. If Apple wanted to buy something, they'd buy it. I think Apple's pretty happy where they are though.
Adobe's products have gotten insanely bloated and crappy the past 5 years, and Apple isn't doing much better either. Quicktime and Itunes love to autorun 8 tons of horsecrap, and Adobe does the same + does a bunch of bullshit activation too. Acrobat Reader has become such a disaster that anyone with a clue has dumped it for Foxit (We just did that at work for 500+ workstations, and we are HEAVY users of the pdf format).
I can see it now. Adobe Quicktime Version 13 Profesional will have 5 autostart services, have mandatory bullshit activation every time it's actively used + background activation every 60 minutes, hijack all your multimedia settings, require 2 gigabytes of disk space and 4 gigabytes of ram, and kill your dog for good measure.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
At least that's what our department head, the guy with advanced degrees in engineering and marketing, says. His claim is: companies that buy other companies who do something similar end up diluting themselves and losing maneuverability.
Apple's already designing hardware *and* operating systems *and* lots of applications. Do they need to spend money on *more* applications, when those applications are currently being managed by someone else who knows how to market them, and whose marketing helps drive Apple's sales effectively for free?
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
While it might seem that Adobe would make a good acquisition for Apple there are several factors weighing against it IMHO. First, the price for Adobe, now that it includes the assets of the former Macromedia combined with the many successful core Adobe products, would be very high indeed for Apple. Apple might do better by reserving such a large chunk of their available investment capital, assuming that they could finance the purchase (haven't checked the respective balance sheets of the companies, but Yahoo Finance could probably get someone a ballpark estimate if they were interested), for internal R&D, improvements to their core products, OSX Leopard for example, and especially their profitable iPhone and iPod hardware sales and services which brings up the second and main point:
The iPhone, iPod, and iTunes angles are so profitable for Apple that it would be hard to justify NOT investing the maximum available capital or the last available profitable investment dollar (where marginal return exceeds marginal cost of investing one more dollar) into the expanding entertainment hardware and media business. The opportunity cost of buying Adobe instead of or at the expense of continued investment in the profitable iPhone, iPod, and iTunes markets may simply be too high, even though Adobe might be a good fit for Apple at least conceptually, to justify.
Disclaimer: I am neither an Apple nor an Adobe shareholder and I have no personal financial interest in either company.
Well, this was *probably* done as a retaliatory move on Apple's part, as much as anything. Apple traditionally had a good foothold in the MIDI music, sequencing, and hard disk recording sectors - but Windows-only products were eating away at their market share. (Think products like Cakewalk Sonar, for example, or ACID Pro, or Gigastudio.)
Furthermore, some of the music gear out there was starting to only include Windows software for the purpose of editing or cataloging sound patches. (I remember buying a Yamaha Motif synthesizer a few years ago, and the only Mac software tools it included were for Mac OS 9.x only. OS X support was "coming soon" for pretty much the whole time I owned it.)
Apple wanted to create at least one more good reason to choose a Mac as a musician.
With Adobe, it's a whole different situation. For starters, Adobe uses their own methods of software development, which appear to be Windows-centric. (All of their new apps for OS X are supporting Intel Mac only, as opposed to "Universal binaries" that work with PPC Macs too. That would indicate they're not writing this stuff with Apple's xcode tools at all, but rather, doing some kind of ports directly over from their Windows versions.) I don't think Apple would want to buy out an entire product line that they'd have to re-code using xcode, before it would even be up to the standards they endorse of supporting both architectures.
Sometimes its fun to write an entire column based on an incredibly unlikely and impractical idea....
You nailed it. Clearly, we have here somebody who read and followed the instructions outlined yesterday in How to Be a Tech Blowhard by Michael Kanellos.
My natural reaction to any blog-sourced article is to ask who the hell is this person and why should consider their opinion credible at all. Unfortunately, there's no bio at all for this Brandon Watts. Another pointless blog-spam as far as I'm concerned.
You've seen a very limited segment of Adobe's market then. In my industry (3D animation) an artist may have Photoshop, Illustrator, 3dsmax, Maya, or any number of other packages (much of it by Autodesk) open at once. Clearly they all need to be on the same OS. This is also why IMHO Adobe needs to look long and hard at porting their products to Linux - animation shops are now moving in a huge way towards Linux workstations (better integration with 'nix render farms, among other things). If anything Adobe wants to buy Autodesk (or the other way around), since those tools are so closely tied together.