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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.'"
I really fail to see why this is interesting.
"When Nature Calls We All Shall Drown" Johan Edlund
monopoly, it was real fun...
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Sorry, but honestly, Apple could develop better stuff than Adobe. The only company that should even consider buying Adobe is MS - they are the ones with the track record of buying crap and making it better (note: I didn't say "good" or "perfect", as they don't always manage the first, and the last is impossible).
Apple should stick to what they are good at - making applications that do what they are supposed to do, de-novo.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
...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)
I was wondering if there was a way to make Flash, Quicktime, and PDFs work WORSE than they already do... the answer: Obviously you should bundle them together.
Imagine an app that takes over ALL file extensions on every windows box, makes it impossible to look at any image, any document, and any web page!
I always thought that the fact that iTunes/Quicktime basically destroy windows PCs was a calculated move. I could never understand why Adobe Reader had a simmilar effect. If you could do the same to Flash it would be the last nail in the coffin for the home user of Windows. Since he who controls flash controls the civilian entertain-web, I would be surprised if there was not a google, MS, Apple bidding war for them. I am actually suprised it hasn't happened yet.
There has been nothing in the past that I have though had the power to kill Windows for the home user than a version of flash that plain does not work right on the PC, like Reader and Quicktime before it.
Sometimes its fun to write an entire column based on an incredibly unlikely and impractical idea. If we are going to make up crap based on conversations with our wives, I propose Apple buys a real Time Machine, goes back in time to 3000 years ago and begins a superior civilization in the North Americas, so that we have populated the Galaxy by tomorrow. And one more thing... Super Intelligent Llamas.
Any other fricken fantasy stories we need to get promoted as actual 'News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters'?
...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!
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....
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
Don't vim and emacs run on OSX?
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.
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.
Kicking ass? With its 3% share of the desktop market?
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.
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.
Besides the obvious "Why?" that this article must prompt in anyone with some common sense, could Apple even afford it?
Adobe has a market cap of 27.36 billion dollars.
Apple has cash reserves of 15 billion dollars and no debt. Apple also made 24 billion dollars in revenue this year (3.5 billion net income).
If Apple wanted to buy Adobe, and didn't mind taking on some debt temporarily, they could.
I don't think they will. I also don't think Adobe would be particularly interested in selling. An attempt to do so also might bring in other interested parties (like Microsoft) and create a bidding war for the company.
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
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
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.
It boils down to this: Pick the battles you can win.
Quick, everyone, let's jump in the wayback machine to the 90's, when Apple "made" just about everything under the sun. And was doing a pretty shit job of it, and suffering for it. Part of what brought back Apple was Steve saying "what the fuck are we doing making digital cameras and a dozen different desktop computers?" They dropped all the shit products Apple was screwing around with, and simplified the product line down to just two laptop models and three desktops, all with clearly delineated target audiences and design.
Apple has benefited for two reasons: their business capabilities are not diluted as much, and consumers find the buying experience easier and simpler.
I've needed to buy a new bike and a cell phone recently. Both industries are chock full of companies that will offer you DOZENS of different products that are all every so slightly different; go look at Nokia's website sometime. Fifty goddamn phones, when really there's only 3-4 categories of 'em.
Apple has acquired sotware packages and such when (I believe) they felt it would benefit the platform, or there was a deal to be had. This is the same reasoning behind the various Apple peripherals we were inundated with in the 90's; nobody else made a good Appletalk laser printer, so Apple said "dammit, we'll do it ourselves." It made sense to some degree, bolstered by the fact that schools liked to buy everything from one place. It's nice to be able to get everything for your gradeschool lab from one place. To some degree.
That's the challenge I think Apple will face in the future: not getting caught up in too many product areas trying to support the platform, to the extent that both the core hardware suffers and the sideline stuff no longer becomes compelling.
Please help metamoderate.
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.
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.
I know apple is a big company. They have gotten HUGE ever since that ipod thingy, absolutely massive. I'm sure they have a mind boggling amount of money just laying around.
But do they really have the cash around to blow on photoshop, flash, etc? That has to be a staggaring amount of money. If I had the multimedia industry as cornered as adobe does, I don't think I'd sell for less than youtube.
while Apple is pushing Cocoa.
If Apple could've purchased a company, I wish it'd been Macromedia before Adobe got to them, and I _still_ wish that FreeHand had been saved one last time and that Adobe had been required to divest themselves of it.
Apple really should haul out the old Sketch.app code and update it to a nice modern drawing program, ideally one as efficient and productive as FreeHand.
William
(who needs to find the time to dig into Cenon's, http://www.cenon.info/ codebase)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Adobe is not Photoshop.
And neither is Gimp.
Comparing Gimp to Photoshop is like comparing the newest laser printer to a early '90s ink-jet printer.
As for Apple buying Adobe, and then going Apple only - that would burry both companies.
Think about it.
You'd have a de facto industry standard (not to mention household name) that is bought up and switched from "ANY computer in the world"-market to a 5%-world market.
99% market share turned into a 5% market share.
Apples shares wouldn't be worth the ink used to print them.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
As long as Adobe continues to operate as a somewhat separate entity from Apple, it would be good for Apple. The loss of Adobe support at some point in the future could kill the Mac, so it makes sense from a future-proofing perspective. Microsoft is slowly and insidiously removing all of their products from the Mac platform, and I wouldn't be surprised if Office 2008 were the last product the Mac BU produces. With the likes of Neooffice (soon OpenOffice), and iWork, this is less of a threat than it would have once been. However, the loss of both Adobe and Microsoft would probably be more than the platform could bear. I think that dropping any Windows support for Adobe products would be a bad move, and Apple wouldn't do it. It would give rise to a new competitor in the niche they just took ownership of. They wouldn't give a up a monopoly in creative tools for the most popular platform on the planet.
Final Cut Studio has become the standard when it comes to professional video editing
FCP is very popular and making inroads to some pro shops but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "the standard" in professional video editing. Avid is still very popular in broadcast shops and Adobe still has a fair number of Premiere users out there. I'd go up against any of them with Sony Vegas. I'd give FCP the upper-middle range.
If anyone should buy Adobe it should be Sony. Then they could both change their name to Sonobe One, which sounds like a Star Wars character.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
1) Recent slashdot articles have claimed that Mac is at about 5% now
2) The fact that 50% use a pirated version (even if true) is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Now, if you claim that 50% of Apple users use a pirated version... well, that would at least be relevant.
3) A lot of the Windows computers out there are office computers that wouldn't be using this anyway. The percentage that's important is the Apple market share amongst professionals, which is most likely *very* different than the standard market share number.
Thank God for evolution.
Purely unscientific personal observations here, but based on what I've seen at a couple of European design schools, the students do tend to favour Macs, and at least some departments at the universities do, too. Whether there's actual logic behind it I couldn't say, these people are usually not terribly computer-savvy, but their perception at least is that Macs are easier to work with. The level of tech support Apple provides seems to be a big selling point, too. Now, what students at school prefer may not translate directly into how things work in the industry at large, but the "designers use macs" truism is not entirely false, still.
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.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The editors seem to have a fascination with stupid pundits. Shall we tag this and similar stories stupidpundit?
Here's one big collective stupidpundit story: when Leopard came out, a bunch of pundits crowed that it was a big leap forward, filesystemwise. Why? Because Leopard has gone over to ZFS as the main file system, and ZFS is the first really new file system in decades.
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.
Darn those stupid pundits. They had me all excited because ZFS really is very cool. If Mac OS had gone over to it, I would have been terribly tempted to buy my first Mac.
Adobe has been developing for Apple OS since the 80s. This blurb sounds as if the platform is lacking apps or neglected by Adobe. Besides, Apple cannot run the gigantic Adobe main tain quality of both software and hardware.
No, we don't need Flash to be even more closed. Apple, despite basing just about everything major on open-source code (OS-X, Safari, X, etc.) they don't seem very into making code open, and say if such a major thing such as Flash was acquired by an OS maker, they could alienate Linux users even more by not providing it. Despite saying that "OS-X is so good because small parts of it are open source" Apple hasn't released major software to Linux such as iTunes and then they try to block the ways us F/OSS programmers find ways around it. Apple is just about as hostile to open source as MS is, its just that Apple knows that Linux is good, MS just thinks it should be eliminated.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Apple should buy Sony. Apple should buy Sun. Apple should buy SGI. Apple should buy Alias Research. Apple should buy Nintendo. Apple should buy AMD. Apple should buy PortalPlayer. Apple should buy Pixo. Apple should buy Palm. Apple should buy into the 700 MHz spectrum. Apple should buy Pixar. Apple should buy Disney. Apple should buy Universal. Apple should buy TiVo. Apple should buy YouTube.
Apple has bought 2 years of flash memory, 50 more acres of land in Cupertino, Next, Coverflow, CUPS, Emagic, Nothing Real, Soundjam MP, plus goodness knows what else (feel free to add to this list.)
But Apple buying Adobe?
That'd scare the heck out of a lot of folks. Apple has bought numerous products & smaller companies for code, patents, or teams before but Adobe (+ the former Macromedia) is a peer on the software side. That'd alienate the huge Windows userbase as well as freak out the many Adobe partners.
And to gain what?
Adobe already sells massively to Apple's customers. Sure their apps may lag, but Adobe has a huge set of codebases that has gone through 68000 -> PPC --> MacOS X --> x86, so if getting things up to speed & certified on each new iteration of MacOS X takes a bit that's not unreasonable.
To Mac-ify the apps? Again, why? Sure Apple is famous for doing really good (if not perfect) UIs but Adobe has some serious credibility too. Indeed it's been pretty clear that Apple & Adobe competing directly in some areas has improved both offerings.
Sorry, but I'm guessing Apple has enough on it's plate now. They'd just be complicating an already good, already mutually profitable situation for little reason or much greater profit.
Indeed look at the list above of companies & products folks think Apple should have bought, and in retrospect consider if they really would have been good investments...
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.
It's bad enough you have to install iTunes with Quicktime. But to do it with a Flash upgrade or an Adobe Reader upgrade (as if Reader's upgrades weren't annoying enough), no thank you.
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
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.
_ _ _
All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
—Jane Wagner
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
No, this wouldn't be the game of Monopoly, but it would be a familiar Wall Street game of corporate take-over... and a stupid one at that.
After the Time Warner / AOL fiasco has resolved into a case of "what were they thinking!?!" and BEA smartly tells Oracle to stuff it, let's look at the idea of Apple taking over Adobe.
First of all, Apple is a company that CEO Steve Jobs has somehow managed to steer into remarkable growth. Ten years ago they merged and integrated with NeXT. Probably not all that hard since both were Steve's babies and both were geographically located in the same place and both were relatively small in terms of staff size. I'm sure the corporate culture transformation had its bumps, but not too bad.
Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle. Now we're talking about a two-campus company, rewriting the corporate management style-guide, firing sales staff and overlapping departments, yada yada yada. That would be mess #1.
Then think about the move of the Adobe code to Apple technology standards. Only an idiot would think Photoshop needs to be re-written as a Cocoa app. Do you really think we would get a better version of Creative Suite 4 next technology cycle? The new product development plans would evolve into mess #2.
Apple does what it does well: they REALLY innovate and focus on User Interface evolution. They see software market opportunities (Final Cut Pro, iLife, Aperture, etc.) and they expand their product line slowly and carefully. They are for the computer industry what Southwest Airlines has been for the Airline Industry for the past 30 years. If they bought Adobe (and other vulnerable software companies) "just because" without any strategy or focus they would become as irrelevant as Sony or Microsoft are becoming.
Now what would be nice would be seeing them slowly and steadily applying their cash into the hiring and development of the best & brightest of computer programming (and hardware engineering and design) talent. Don't buy Adobe and get stuck with some brilliant and some mediocre programmers; poach the top talent away from Adobe with top paychecks. That's my Good Idea #1.
I have one more Good Idea #2: create an incubation machine that finds programming talent and innovative spirit and spins off small software companies that can write incredible native-Apple killer apps. Apple has the corporate strategy, the design methodology, and the technology. They also exist in only one geographic location in the country. (And I, a developer in New York City, would kill for an opportunity to do Apple-platform development without moving to CA.) And I will agree that there are many apps and utilities that are needed--especially in the business/corporate IT niche--that exceed what the small Shareware developers can manage. If Apple could spin-off smaller Apple subsidiaries that had a stronger link to "the mothership", and if Apple invested some of its cash reserves into ongoing but cash-strapped projects (Gimp and OpenOffice are real, albeit imperfect, examples) we might get somewhere.
The really interesting challenge will be if Apple can grow in size while avoiding the bureaucratic morass that large corporations so often become. We shall see what the future holds...
Murray Todd Williams