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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."
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.
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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If Adobe cuts off OS X versions of their professional tools like Photoshop, they will be losing about 50% of their customers.
OR Apple may lose them. Adobe still holds a lot of clout in that area.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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.
When it comes to software like Flash, AfterEffects, Illustrator, etc., becoming an expert user of the application software is orders of magnitude harder than learning a new OS.
Also, if you use any of the aforementioned software packages professionally, the value of time and money spent learning the software and developing a productive workflow is far in excess of hardware and OS costs. This becomes especially true as you integrate custom application-specific scripts into your workflow and build up a library of project templates and other application-specific assets.
I wouldn't bet on that dude, you'd be surprised how many graphic artists know those tools like the back of their hand. Considering the only "learning curve" for using Windows 7 with Photoshop would be "Start PC, click on desktop link" I don't think one can even compare the amount of retraining one would need to replace Photoshop. Hell one of my customers is an old school graphics artist, and he pays me to keep his circa 2003 PC going alongside the new dual AMD I built him simply so he can run a single program and switch between the desktops with a single KVM switch. he does all that just so he can keep Macromedia Xres, which he knows like the back of his hand. While he has photoshop along with corel and a dozen other tools on his main duallie, he says for certain tasks that would take a half an hour and a dozen menu layers in Photoshop he can get them done in under 3 minutes and a couple of clicks with Xres.
The sad part is while this would probably kill most OSX sales, I honestly doubt Jobs would care. They are making so much money on consumer level gear like iPad, iPhone, and iPod that I doubt sales of Mac is even a blip on the radar anymore. But if Photoshop goes Windows only I can see a lot of graphics guys either spending all their time booted into Windows via Bootcamp, or forgoing getting a new Mac at all and just going with a high end Windows laptop. The level of complexity of learning a new heavy duty graphics program would make the trivial learning how to get around in Windows 7 (which has an excellent help system and tons of how to videos) pale in comparison.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Enjoy your new all Silverlight Photoshop.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley