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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.
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
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.
Riiiight. Because Microsoft has never done anything like that.
Facebook is the new AOL
It's called Silverlight.
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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.
Flash for Linux and OS X will be replaced with twenty megabytes worth of infinite loops. Linux and Mac magazines will remark how the new Flash is more stable while offering the same level of performance as before.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
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.