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Against Apple, Ballmer Floats Microsoft Merger With Adobe
Ebbesen writes "Ballmer had a meeting with the CEO of Adobe, and among other things: 'The meeting, which lasted over an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could partner in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.' Apparently MS has courted Adobe previously, but feared anti-trust regulations. With Google and Apple gaining, Microdobe might be possible."
This is horrifiyng news. What would happen to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign?
One less company to hate.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Oh God, I so hope this happens. Microsoft may have a bad reputation for security, but quite honestly nothing is as big a nightmare for IT than anything and everything Adobe. Reader, Flash, CS... it's all a perpetual pain in the butt that Adobe always drops the ball with deployment and maintenance.
Plus maybe then we can stop every MS site from needing SilverLight and every MS application installing an XPS Viewer/Printer.
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
So....Flash will suck on my Ubuntu machines even more now? I'm going to go cry myself to sleep tonight.
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It's bad enough Mac users still have to install MS Office because it won't really interoperate with things like iWork or open office. Now imagine all those Mac creative types experiencing the pain of a MS-owned and focused Adobe.
I have to say, this is a crazy time to be in IT, software, and the mobile space. It's almost reminiscent of the chaos of the dot-com days: constant tech churn, companies rising and falling, etc. Hopefully we can avoid the bubble part ;-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
If they make money, Microsoft will keep making them.
EG: Microsoft Office for Mac
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Well its another reason Flash will never make it to the iPhone !
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
>>>One less company to hate.
"Arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you."
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Among the "top 10" for insecure software products, I can see the pack leaders are Windows, Acrobat PDF plugins, and Flash. Such a merger sounds like a match made in heaven.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It's called Silverlight.
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Saying a Mac is secure is like saying you can't get STDs from a fleshlight.
The language is technically correct, but it implies a lack of experience and understanding.
The same thing that is happening now. Adobe products on the mac aren't all that great anymore.
You can blame Apple and their constantly changing direction for that. How can you add in new features if you have to rewrite the core of the software just to account for Apple's newest platform changes? Adobe is still catching up after Apple yanked 64-bit Carbon support out from under them.
Or Flash player for Mac and Linux will be 'out sourced' in an extra special way, suffer epic version drift and just be dropped for Silverlight Home.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You're spot on. Microsoft does not buy other companies to merge with them. Microsoft buys them out and shuts them down.
If they can eliminate Adobe from the competition, then Apple is the only target left. Ballmer doesn't care at all whether CS, Flash, Acrobat, or mobile devices succeed. He only cares about shareholder profitability. We outsiders will guess and post on slashdot but it won't affect the outcome at all. If the deal goes through, Adobe will fade away.
Personally, I like Adobe's past, though they've made some serious errors starting around 2001. It may be time to close up shop. I wonder.
Yeah, and they can get rid of that stupid cross-platform support too!
Two large, lumbering companies with zero agility that have coasted for a decade on their successful products from the 90s and failed with everything since, decide to become one larger company that's less agile, less creative, and even less likely to do something game changing or even newly profitable.
Yeah, that's some scary competition. What did Bill Gates say so many years ago? Something like "We didn't want to become IBM"? Well, IBM, in a corporate sense, has become far more dynamic than MS is today. Don't see a merger with Adobe changing that.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I highly doubt that Microsoft will buy Adobe. More than likely, they are looking into possible ways to get Flash on their new Windows 7 Phone OS so that they can have a larger legion of developers making games for their new mobile OS to more easily compete with the iOS from Apple.
$SO_AND_SO has invited you to join $GAME!
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I don't see this as a good idea for either company. Both companies have similar strengths and weaknesses - call them evil, rail against them or whatever - the companies have products that hit the same value curve in the market place. They are weak against their competition in the same ways, and strong in the same ways, to state the point again. Add to that the other points brought up in this conversation - how Microsoft has already attempted to compete against every one of Adobe's primary products - and there isn't much motivation for Microsoft or Adobe to make this happen. I'm a little skeptical that this will go anywhere.
Given that Adobe hasn't upgraded to Cocoa precisely because they don't want to orphan people's libraries of existing photoshop plugins (which Adobe is terrified might cause them to switch to a different piece of software, if they're going to have to re-buy everything anyway), I doubt people will switch to a different OS and force that same re-buy on themselves voluntarily.
Microsoft has crippled Office on the Mac by not providing MS Access and binary compatible automation piece to let people build their own groupware out of it, but it's unlikely they would do the same to Photoshop. They are far far more likely to introduce a "Flash II" product *cough* Sliverlight *cough*, which is basically the same thing they did when they introduced Microsoft Money.
-- Terry
Microsoft has replaced postscript with XPS. IE and Silverlight can display XPS, so goodbye Acrobat. Silverlight does video and RIA. Goodbye Flash. Expression Blend can do what Illustrator does, although it's not as mature.
Please don't confuse offering really bad alternatives with replacing things.
Microsoft's been introducing alternatives for years but even in the 90s most companies doing multimedia and pagination knew better and continued to buy Apple as that's always the area that
Microsoft has never offered anything remotely approaching the functionality of Display PostScript for its operating systems (I still get times even now when I'm working on a client's machine when the OS has problems loading because the resolution settings are so screwed up to the point where Windows can't display anything because the monitor can't correctly output the display settings) nor has it ever provided any built-in support for monitor calibration prior to the introduction of WCS in Vista.
There's a reason that people were still buying Macs even throughout the 90s for multimedia and pagination purposes as Apple first introduced Colorsync back in 1993 and Microsoft has finally started to play catchup, and it only took them 14 years, but they still have a very long to go even with the most recent release of Windows 7!
And with no one giving MS a chance of succeeding in the mobile space, the time may be right to sidestep antitrust issues.
Doubtful, really, as Android has already filled the void for a consumer phone OS to fill the gap, and Microsoft really showed how great they could design a phone with the Kin. If they had managed to acquire Palm I think that would have been a smarter acquisition for them as they could give up on Windows Mobile (the big flaw of which is shown by the name in that Microsoft is still determined to port over a desktop experience to a phone rather than starting from scratch to create an OS specifically geared for mobile devices) and shift over to WebOS but given HP (who was huge driving force for Windows Mobile devices back in the day with its iPaq line) showed how confident they are in Microsoft's ability to create a quality mobile operating system by buying Palm out from under them!
Microsoft gets a migration path from Adobe to Silverlight. Adobe shareholders get $$$'s and not uncertainty.
The uncertainty will come from the government.
I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to say with that paragraph as it sounds like you're admitting that Adobe is actually making money from their offerings whereas pretty much the only profitable divisions of Microsoft at this point are Office, Servers, and Windows Desktop OS bundling sales which is really not the best way to support you're point.
Bottom line for me is that Photoshop didn't get to verb status without Adobe doing something right. While I'lll freely admit I've had issues with Adobe's semi-recent trend of rolling out overpriced bloatware more and more quickly in recent years, for the most part the CS line is still the industry standard, so while I would love to see Adobe clean up it's act I don't think allowing Microsoft to acquire Adobe is going to help them in that practice!
I'm honest enough to admit I lie to myself.
Enjoy your new all Silverlight Photoshop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Personally, as a designer, I'm completely sick of Adobe's bloated crap. Between Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver, you would think they could produce an integrated product that could easily design and build a website. You would be wrong. It USED to be easy, before CS. Now it's crap. They keep adding features, but they completely fail to address even the most basic levels of the production process.
I would LOVE to see some of Apple's UI mojo thrown on a project like that.
"we can look forward to bloated, insecure flash". Bloody hell, it's here today!
P.S. - Thank you developers of Flash Block
Break every flash browser game today? Probably not.
Stop development work on Flash, let it flounder and then when IE 11 comes out with a new plugin architecture (which oh-what-a-shame means Flash no longer runs) kill it altogether? I wouldn't bet against something like that.
from that angle some secret sponsorship from intel is probably likely, just think of the cpu load of a version of flash developed by MS
People, what a bunch of bastards
Yes, this is a slashdot and MS bashing is the name of the game, but Adobe is so much worse than MS that this merger can only be a net gain for end users.
Not bashing, just watching the blind leading the blind...
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.