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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.'"
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)
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!
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.