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.'"

Comments

What?

[jackelfish]

I really fail to see why this is interesting.

Why not TiVo?

[PapayaSF]

Adobe makes sense as an acquisition, but more people watch TV than use Photoshop. And, of course, Apple is moving more into consumer electronics. They should buy TiVo, redo the interface in a slick Apple way, and link it to the iTunes Movie Store. At the same time, sell them alongside big, beautiful Apple-brand HDTVs with well-designed connections and controls, which is a weak point on other HDTVs.

Also, come out with some sort of mini-tower Mac in between (in cost and features) the Mini and the Mac Pro....

Other way around...?

[nine-times]

If you ask me, Adobe shouldn't be looking to be acquired by an OS-maker. Instead, Adobe should be looking to acquire an OS.

I've been working in IT for various kinds of media companies, and in a lot of cases, there are people whose entire jobs are centered around using Adobe apps. You could throw Adobe CS3 on any system and any OS, and those people would still be able to do their jobs just fine. The OS doesn't matter.

So let's say Adobe develops their own Linux/BSD variant or buys someone else's. With very little work on their end, they could actually become a competitor to Microsoft. What often keeps linux from a lot of desktop these days is the lack of specific professional media applications. Adobe could make their own port of OpenOffice/Evolution/Linux, bundle that with Adobe CS3, and have a pretty formidable media/business desktop OS.

Re:Other way around...?

[nine-times]

What they would gain is true platform independence. Right now, they do a lot to support Microsoft in MS's battle against Linux. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to screw Adobe over by creating competing applications and formats. Long-term, it's a losing proposition for Adobe. If Microsoft manages to displace PDF, Photoshop, and Flash (as is Microsoft's goal), Adobe will be severely hurt.

If they were able to support Linux/Unix (beyond OSX), then Microsoft would have a harder time forcing users into using the competing Microsoft products. Right now, if Microsoft changes their OS to break PDF while pushing their own format, it's still at the point where they could theoretically get people to drop PDF. It's not likely, but it's possible, since Adobe is still so tied to MS.

So, in short, Adobe is reliant on Microsoft and Apple to deliver their applications to users. Being able to put their apps on an open-source platform is potentially valuable. However, supporting Linux/BSD is complicated by all the different distros. They'd probably have to pick a distro to support, and at that point, they may as well take a particular distro and brand their own branded version. They could still rely on the open source community for security updates and the like, but it would enable them to build flash/PDF into the OS in interesting ways, possibly improving efficiency.

Anyway, I'm not saying it will happen or even that it should happen. I'm just saying that, if I were running Adobe, I'd be more interested in branding my own version of Linux (while continuing to make my applications for Windows and OSX) than I would be in making my products OSX-only or Windows-only. I think that if I ran Adobe, I'd probably have some level of internal development for Linux in case Ubuntu actually managed to grab some market share.

Apple's out to @#$% Adobe, not buy them.

[Trillan]

WItness that Mac OS X 10.4 and later come with a complete set of Photoshop clone construction tools. See Acorn, DrawIt, Pixelmator and even later versions of GraphicConverter. Adobe dragged their heels too long.

Apple has lots of cash

[BearRanger]

But that doesn't mean they should spend it on Adobe, unless they've gotten wind of something the rest of us haven't.

Apple has a pretty compelling story just now. They have a new OS with tools developers are excited about using. The Mac is gaining market share, so developers are more inclined to write software for the platform. That should include Adobe. However, much of Adobe's software is written using Apple's 32-bit Carbon framework. It will be an expensive proposition for Adobe to move forward and develop new 64-bit Cocoa versions of their code.

If Apple could positively determine that Adobe was not going to make this investment it might make sense for them to buy them to make sure that it happened. Adobe software is hugely important to Apple--look at how many people held off making the transition to Intel Macs until CS3 was ready. Apple is not a huge company, employee-wise. They could eventually develop competing products at the cost of increasing their number of employees, a lead time to market and risking incompatibility with the existing market standard. Given those terms, purchasing Adobe could be the cheaper option.

But unless Adobe plans to abandon the Mac this purchase wouldn't make much sense for Apple.

Re:i used to play this game as a kid...

[betterunixthanunix]

Thank you. There should be competition among proprietary products, that is the only way that they improve.

Re:Apple leads share in key Adobe markets

[fyngyrz]

The thing is, print and prepress are steeply declining. Magazines are getting thinner, readership is dropping for everything from porn to popular science; why pay for month old news and views when you can get it tonight, for free, up to the second, on the web?

We spent literally years building extensive prepress into our products until we had a more flexible and more powerful model than Photoshop had, something able to flex further and simply get a better print result by virtue of better control over the various print issues like allowing a mix of UCR and GCR approaches, more flexible and easier to use color separation models; and it used to be that a lot of our customers were very into getting that last bit of quality through the printshop and onto the paper.

No longer. Our userbase continues to increase, but a goodly number of our old print customers have moved on to web-centric undertakings and we hear from relatively fewer new print people. I can't say I'm disappointed, a prepress person tends to need a lot more care and support than a web designer does, all other things being equal.

The problem that a company like Adobe faces is that very little of what Photoshop does is all that hard to find in less expensive software. Apple knows this; buying Adobe would simply be buying a name, because the underlying technology is no mystery to anyone. Apple's already facing Adobe directly with the Aperture / Lightroom product pair - if Apple wants an imaging product, there are comparably powerful engines out there already, or they could devote a couple of savvy imaging people and a GUI person to the project and they'd have something significant in a year or so. As opposed to spending how much for Adobe? Jobs is a pain in the ass, particularly when he gets distracted by consumer gear such as phones and mpeg players, but I've never heard him successfully characterized as actually being stupid with regard to the computer business.

In the end, if you lift up the rock the prepress people live under, you're going to find a lot of dead and dying critters. Print just isn't that big a deal any more other than to the shrinking demographic who are invested in it for whatever reason.

Web graphics, animation, video, photography - Apple's already prodding these markets. Do they really need Adobe? I can't see that they do.