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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."
I just vomited in my coffee.
Facebook is the new AOL
Microsoft and Adobe merging is an option that would increase efficiency. That way I can direct my hatred in one direction with less distraction from various evil companies.
One less company to hate.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
Adobe bought Macromedia back in distant times, so if Microsoft buy Adobe, won't that make them Micromacrobe?
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Microdobe? Please.
If Adobe is lucky, they will be "Adobe, an independently managed subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation".
More likely, Adobe + Microsoft = Microsoft.
Double the evil, double the fun.
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
... that has to get Ballmer's sweat stains out of the furniture in that meeting room!
Guaranteed! This comment 100% Anthrax free!
I know we all hate Flash, but we need it (sometimes) and I doubt Microbe would continue development on Flash for Linux.
Well I would guess they would be Windows only. The opposite happened when Apple bought Logic Pro and offered migration to the Mac version, as there would be no future windows builds. Apple sowed the wind on this particular trick..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
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?
This is horrifiyng news. What would happen to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign?
They would all get 'ribbons' and Clippy.
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.
And with no one giving MS a chance of succeeding in the mobile space, the time may be right to sidestep antitrust issues.
Microsoft gets a migration path from Adobe to Silverlight. Adobe shareholders get $$$'s and not uncertainty.
The uncertainty will come from the government.
Given that Microsoft has never been able to compete effectively against any of those three packages, or even really attempted to for that matter, I would guess that the Adobe coding teams would be assimilated into Microsoft whole and continue as if nothing much had happened. You'd probably be getting your CS updates via the Windows Update site from the next major release though, which would be a major plus point in my opinion. Jokes about having plenty of practice aside, one thing that Microsoft does do very well is patch management and deployment. Personally, I wish they'd put in some suitable security mechanisms, open up the API and let third parties plug into the Microsoft Update mechanism; it'd be really nice to have something like YUM or APT for Windows boxes...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Microsoft and Adobe are now going to be Microbe, I always suspected they virus'
In a bit of shameless internet panhandling, I accept Litecoin Donations at Lbd2oH9QsthD1GfuUXPyka12YxvWJYnBVf
>>>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
Riiiight. Because Microsoft has never done anything like that.
Facebook is the new AOL
How many Windows users of Logic Pro were there? My recollection was there were not many so cutting the Windows version wasn't a big loss, and Apple didn't want to support a Windows version. If Adobe cuts off OS X versions of their professional tools like Photoshop, they will be losing about 50% of their customers.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's called Silverlight.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
ColdFusion used to be great. When it was just owned by Allaire. Then MacroMedia walks into the picture, buys Allaire and starts putting out buggy ColdFusion releases. Then Adobe buys MacroMedia and people thought they would handle ColdFusion better, but soon found out that all they really were doing was cramming Flash in it to make it even buggier and bloated.
I love CFML, but I haven't used Adobe's ColdFusion in over 2 years. Railo and BlueDragon for me.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
There wouldn't be any name change for Microsoft - the brand is far too valuable. Adobe would cease to exist; or rather they would become a subsidiary and only funnel money to Microsoft.
They have very few competing products, which is great for the customers of both. There would be far more integration, very little product loss.
It would be great to see Flash take on some of Silverlight's power and ease of development. Combining the best of the two would create a very worthy foe. Coldfusion has long had a few features that ASP should have had. FrameMaker could lend a hand to Word, and Visio could become an addin to FrameMaker...as all three are used very much when writing technical books.
After the scare Adobe received earlier this year at the hands of Apple, Adobe must realize at any time Apple holds the power in their relationship. Although Adobe is responsible for Apple's early dominance in the graphic and motion industry, Apple no longer needs them. In terms of sales, Adobe has always made most of their money supporting Microsoft's operating system.
Lately both companies have seen innovation only in the form of acquisitions of smaller, more nimble companies. Whatever they choose, they need to do it before the slide starts.
It looks like you're trying to edit that spring break photo with that guy you thought was a chick.
Would you like help?
Someday we'll hit the human carrying capacity. And the band will just play on.
Well, that merger would spell the death of Flash pretty damn quickly. What, you think Microsoft would keep Flash _and_ Silverlight? You think they'd keep Flash _instead_ of Silverlight? Don't kid yourself - they are a corporate culture company with political infighting of the worst degree. The Microsoft team would do everything and then some to ensure that all products that Adobe made that duplicated existing Microsoft products were wiped from the face of computing. If they're willing to nonchallantly stab fellow Microsoft execs in the back to ensure their product gets favoured treatment, just think how ruthless they'll be against non-Microsoft execs...
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
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.
As far as I know, that is not correct. PDF is an open format, and anyone can write software to create PDF's without needing a licence from Adobe. The reason PDF export isn't built into MS Office is because MS decided not to do it.
Why is it so hot? Where am I going? What am I doing in this handbasket?
Boo-freakin-hoo! Apple told developers ten years ago that Carbon was just a bridge to the new OS and that Cocoa was the way to go. Adobe knew full well that sooner or later, carbon applications were going to be second-class citizens; and spent the last ten years with their heads in the sand about it.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
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.
Found the story about it, seems to be kind of a funny issue. Apparently Adobe sued MSFT in Europe because they didn't want the competition with Acrobat, but you're right, PDF is an open format, and Adobe at another time said anyone could work with it. Guess it's just because Office would be making money off it? Here's the story
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
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.
The Microbee was a home computer from Australia in the early 80s. With a merger between Microsoft and Adobe, they may just catch its performance.
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
Halo originally wasn't ever intended to be an XBox game. Back in those days, Bungie was a Mac-only game company.
Then Bungie publicly showed a demo of an early alpha version in action. M$ saw it and decided they wanted to have it as an exclusive for the new console they were developing.
To Mac users it was like Halo was stolen before it even left the womb.
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.
Well other than the fact the when bought by Microsoft it had a shit load of money thrown at it I was going off the first sentence of the article on Wikipedia. I've played a few Halos and I don't remember any being RTS.
XPS shows everything wrong with MS, even with a rival (!) like Adobe.
They come up with a "document" standard and yet they didn't even ship a viewer (let alone some virtual printer) for OS X. I am not even mentioning Linux support which is big deal on corporate. I don't want to cost anyone their job at that weirdo company so not giving any examples but it seems, they do create a lot of docs on OS X, export to PDF (or PS), re-export to XPS on a Windows machine/bot.
That is supposed to be Microsoft's answer to PDF. Just imagine if XPS really replaced PDF. It wouldn't be a nice day for anyone not using Windows on Desktop/Mobile. I am not even sure if there is an official XPS viewer for Windows 7 Mobile.
I got creative friends and imagine my surprise when I find out about "Expression" software, as I am not in that segment, I asked them and they -too- didn't have a clue about that software. They had a good laugh when they heard they are supposed to use "that thing" (their words) to do work for Silverlight. You know, in dream World of MS (and Ballmer), designers even use MS Visual Studio and OS X using designers install Eclipse to do Silverlight. Yea, right.
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.
Bungie was a, or perhaps the , well-known Mac-friendly game developer...
When I think Mac-friendly game developer, the first name that springs to mind is Blizzard.
At the time we're talking about, though, Blizzard was "Those guys that made Lost Vikings and Warcraft 1."
Microsoft bought Bungie around 2000 from memory. Blizzard was far more than just Warcraft 1 by that stage.
Why would you spend the enormous amount of money to retool your applications into Cocoa when Apple is advertising 64-Bit Carbon?
When Apple did their 180 and pulled the rug out from under not only Adobe, but many other developers, it's their that they were expecting what was advertised? They spent money towards that Carbon 64-bit, and Apple screwed them. Seeing how Apple has been treating Flash like a dirty condom, I can't help but wonder if Apple planned it this way. Final Cut vs Premiere. Aperture vs Lightroom. Maybe this was a planned move to try to get market share away from Adobe.
Either way, what I was disputing with Final Cut, is that if Cocoa was 1: the way to go, and 1: ready, why didn't Apple get their FCP people programming in Cocoa long ago? According to all the fanbois, Adobe should have switched to Cocoa long ago, yet here's Apple's own FCP, one of Apple's software that could most benefit from a 64-bit edition. No moves there? Whats the hurry then?