I don't know how Apple would feel about having to deal with all those enterprise customers who run Adobe software on PCs only. Also, a number of Adobe products don't have Mac versions, like ColdFusion and JRun. Yes, there are still places that rely on this software.
What's "CS"? Unless it's Outlook's calendaring, I doubt it will have any effect on "the enterprise". Remember, most people only use their computers to send email, setup meetings, and browse Facebook.
Correct, but a large chunk of corporations have in house creative departments and many(if not most) use macs. Killing the Mac version of CS would force them to switch back to PC.
Helpful to whom? of all the devs I've ever met that have used CF, the most positive thing I've ever heard said about it is that "they're used to its failings and it's comfortable". I can't help but think Microsoft's tools are a much more appealing value proposition than Adobe's in this particular space.
Microsoft's tools may be more appealing than Cold Fusion or JRun, but they are still less appealing than pretty much everything else this side of Java.
At least with CF and (IIRC) JRun you are not locked into Windows...
Yeah, it's a little strange that it actually sits in the same basic ecosystem as everything else on the other side of the microsoft stack and yet manages to be worse even than the MS offerings.
Frankly even considering the vendor lock-in implicit in being wed to the MS stack, I'd take that option over CF any day of the week. That said I see no reason to choose between different degrees of poison when there's plenty of good clean water around.
I wonder if Microsoft is thinking the same thing. Either as a defensive move to make sure Photoshop will always work on Windows or as an offensive move and making Photoshop and friends windows only in an attempt to strangle the OS X platform.
You're correct in a general sense, but for the specific case of designers working in fields where the standard computer is a Windows machine I've almost always seen an exception made for the design department to use Macs.
Apple has been able to create pro level software for both audio and video editing industries. If Adobe/Microsoft scraped its mac line of products, I bet Apple would have a competing product out in 12 months that graphic designers would flock to.
Note, however, that those were all originally acquisitions. FCP was born at Macromedia and Apple purchased the product and hired the team. Shake came from the Nothing Real acquisition. Logic is from the Emagic acquisition.
I assume that Microsoft is making some money on Office for Mac. They aren't developing that product for charity. I don't see any reason for them to kill off development for the Mac, especially if they acquire Adobe.
Microsoft could use some help in the mobile market, though, so I can believe the idea of those two companies joining forces to make some headway there.
Vendor lock-in isn't as crucial to Adobe's CS as it is to Office. Microsoft doesn't want anybody to even think that there's such a thing as an "Office alternative", whereas recent years have proven that upstart competitors to components of CS can get traction.
So, while killing CS for Mac might work (users switching platforms might outnumber users switching programs), killing Office for Mac would just force universities to switch to ODF and in the long term, it would hurt the rest of Office's markets.
IMHO that would be a catastrophe for Apple: the existence of MS Office being the only reason Mac OS X (and not Linux) is an accepted alternative for employees inside many companies (including at Adobe btw).
Sorry, but CS is niche software used by certain professionals. MS Office / Exchange are used by everybody else ;)
And I wouldn't bet against Microsoft for providing an alternative to CS: judging from the experience of using Microsoft Blend, they are rookies, but they can manage it.
It might be harder than you think to replace highly refined creative tools such as Illustrator or Photoshop.
Although they have become rather bloated and the last few versions have failed to innovate in significant ways, there is a lot of graphics professionals who would be very reluctant to waste all that hard-won muscle-memory.
Plus there's a lot of work-flow knowledge in them there apps.
I agree that replacing Illustrator and Photoshop are nontrivial. I doubt that a typical startup could do it.
On the other hand, it would be a natural fit for someone like Autodesk given their resources and markets. Retail box graphics applications could make sense in Microsoft's product line. Even Corel would be in a position to capitalize on Adobe leaving the Windows market.
Adobe has long lost any luster it might have had, and has descended into outsourced maintenance-ware. An acquisition like this would be about as smart as Intel acquiring Mc(rap)fee...
I just don't get that. It's not like MS have the superior computer scientists and the rest of us are little children. Adobe has the money to pay people to solve those problems. The Flash situation on Mac and Linux is just ridiculous.
Not sure why you were downvoted. You made a valid point.
Slightly offtopic but since people are dicussing updates. Updates are an important part of the sotfware lifecycle. It's no big deal that sometimes the updater might need to be updated.
I personally get a bit angry when of all people, software engineers get annoyed about updates. You should know better that the update to software would push better algorithms, reducing CPU and memory usage while it might also have security fixes making software more secure.
Nobody (not even Apple) makes perfect software. There is no such thing as bug free code. Updates fix bugs.
I understand it is a bit psychological too, since people complain more about free updates than paid ones.
Engineers should promote updates amongst friends and family and not deride updates in public.
There's updates and there's updates. If an update automagically installs itself and restarts your machine because you went to the kitchen to make yourself a tea and a sandwich and you lose work, that's one thing. Same if an update forces you to wait for it to download and install when you really need to get some work done. Bonus negative points if you are on a connection where you pay by the kilobyte with international roaming. If an update asks for consent, installs cleanly without breaking things or making your machine unusable for the time, and does not destroy your work if you aren't paying attention, that's another thing. There's a good reason people dislike updates. The correct thing to do is fix them, not advocate them.
Don't think only about lawsuits but also patent extortion. If their IP lawyers send a threatening letter and the receiver just complies and pays, we usually never get to hear about it.
A lawsuit is like having to beat up somebody to make an example out of him. It only happens when people refuse to pay for protection.
I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere... Something about how an adobe (proper noun) is naturally small and soft. Seems somehow fitting for the two companies to become one, no?
There is something to that - Microsoft has been spending a lot of money and resources trying to encourage Silverlight adoption. One way to do that might be to buy the rights to Flash.
Microsoft already has a problem with runtime fragmentation - their software and dev platforms are split between native and COM-based stuff (Windows, Office, most of their consumer apps), .NET/CLR based stuff (.NET, Silverlight, XNA, most of their enterprise apps) and increasingly JavaScript/web based stuff (IE, most of their web properties). The last thing they need is to add a fourth runtime to those.
Apple really needs to buy Adobe. Apple's response will determine how much life they see in their "truck" (OS X) line. This, coupled with Intel's comments on Apple, really make me wonder.
Regarding: "Adobe's shares rise as much as 17 percent"
Just a small detail, but the above bullet exaggerates the indicative reaction of the market. It was up 17 percent for an instant because someone fat fingered and bought it for $30.00 exactly at 3:08pm (Added: 12 minutes after the announcement at 2:56pm), maybe a little excited to buy in. Really it is up 10-11%, which is a strong and positive reaction, but there is more uncertainty factored into the price than what the bullet would seem to imply.
Gotta love stock markets. A rumor arises of two CEO's secretly meeting, and stocks skyrocket instantly. I'd assume that nobody actually knows what they were discussing, if they even met. Wouldn't be much of a secret meeting otherwise.
It's really interesting, when you think about it as a system that changes in response to observation.
Can you imagine if physical systems worked like that? That observed physical phenomena would change in response to what the experimenter/observer thinks will happen?
Not really. QM measurements follow probability distributions, but are not dependent on what the experimenter thinks about the system.
Consider a 2-state single particle system, the outcome probabilities of one state vs. the other are fixed by the Hamiltonian and the time evolution of the system, and not by the experimenter's opinion of the system.
I should have been more precise when I said observation. In QM, clearly scientific "observation" acts on the system, causing the system to "collapse" into a definite state, but what I meant by observation in my previous comment was that speculative observation, commentary and opinion can affect the state of the system.
I suppose this is feasible if Microsoft is looking to acquire Adobe's enterprise customer base - the PDF, document management, etc part of the company. Having Air/Flex/Flash might also be nice, but doesn't seem like a good fit for Microsoft's traditional Windows-centric strategy (one they should abandon, in my view - the days of owning the market via the desktop are rapidly coming to a close).
What I'd love to see is Microsoft buy the Flash/PDF side of the company, and then the creative arm (CS, the type foundry, lightroom, etc) be spun off into an independent company that was once again run by people passionate about design and great software.
Softimage was bought for a purpose and spun off later. It was bought by Microsoft to port Softimage|3D (and develop XSI) for NT platform - to show NT is as powerful for those applications as IRIX was. It was done, and it was sold later to AVID, now Softimage is part of Autodesk.
On a side note, I always thought Autodesk was Adobe's natural predator, I was expecting a buy offer from them.
When I wrote a an XSI plugin for a feature film production, in 2005, for XSI running on Linux, half of the API was still using COM, it the app required a special gcc version that shipped with the sdk to compile plugins with and the Python was ActiveState Python (which clashed with the Linux system's Python).
In short, it was a disaster from a developers, and still a lot of trouble from a user's pov.
Now Adobe doesn't support Linux much but if what MS did to XSI is anything to go by, I wouldn't want to be a developer on one of those apps, after the acquisition.
I agree, Softimage was just mishandled. It was brought into Microsoft with a single task, and Sumatra(XSI) was architected at a really bad point in time for them. It was done on the verge of NT era, so they went berserk. Softimage (they have renamed XSI) is now a really solid piece of software, AGAIN mishandled by Autodesk. sigh.
MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It had a lot of potential, particularly since MS could have parlayed it into a part of the premiere games development platform, but they bobbled it pretty badly and ended up with trueSpace instead, which has really never come even close to living up to its potential.
Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.
I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.
> MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly.
It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.
They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.
The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.
Edit:
The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.
The Rare team was spun out of Microsoft. They were the video game company that Microsoft bought from Nintendo. They were responsible for Golden Eye, Conquer, and Perfect Dark.
I'm not sure if this would be considered a successful spin off though as Microsoft bought them when they were, IMHO, at their peak.
I would not count Rare as a good acquisition: Microsoft bought them for $375M, and they haven't produced a single hit since. To put that in perspective, Bungie (a much smaller studio than Rare at the time) was acquired for less than $40M, and their games and IP generated over $1B (and counting) in revenue for Microsoft.
I believe CitySearch was also spun off. That one isn't going so well.
I know there are a few core products that were results of acquisitions, namely PowerPoint and Visio. They've pretty much integrated deeply into Microsoft, so that's always a possibility here.
Don't know about the rest of Adobe, but the flash team is heavily intertwined with mozilla and google developers. Go sample irc.mozilla.org sometime.
Fun fact, the first JavaScript was written by a Netscaper in Lisp. The first ActionScript was in Standard ML, and now both guys work on ECMAScript :-) ActionScript's engine powers Mozilla's JS engine (yes, flash and firefox engines off the same code base!) and the Lisper guy works on V8. Get into the javascript scene and you will find the intellectual incest that is hacking.
As a thought: If it does happen, I can totally see an MS Office GRAND DELUXE edition that puts together Office and CS. And I would guess that the price would be less than the sum of the individual packages.
I'm not sure I understand: how would a merger between these two companies get past the regulators? I doubt they'd let Apple jump into bed with Adobe, let alone Microsoft...
Randal C. Picker, a professor of law of the University of Chicago law school, said in a telephone interview that the technology space is drastically different than it was when Microsoft was originally charged with antitrust violations and an acquisition or partnership of this nature would likely not be halted.
Mr. Picker said that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are focused on other large technology companies and consumer related issues.
Thanks, very interesting. I'm genuinely surprised though, as we're talking about some huge spaces being gobbled up: Photoshop, ColdFusion, Director, Flash, FrameMaker, Illustrator etc. And those are just some of their bigger names! :)
I would have thought that the antitrust concerns would go the other way this time - the combined company using the dominance of Photoshop to prop up Windows (by cancelling the Mac version), or the dominance of Flash to prop up Windows Mobile (by killing Flash for Android).
From the original NYT report [1], the discussions seem to be less about acquisition, and more about “Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could partner in the battle against Apple.”
Indeed, acquisition is a real and fascinating possibility, but surely there are many other ways they could work together to fight Apple, if that is what they want to do.
It's a bit like old school advertising (billboards, TV) versus Google pay-per-click ads. As soon as you can measure something accurately, it's value decreases.
This would be quite interesting. If Microsoft bought Adobe, what would happen to PDF on Mac? What would happen to Silverlight? Would the next Office use PDF as a standard format?
Then there's the creative suite. What would happen to photoshop? Dreamweaver (or MS Frontpage 2012 as it'd be renamed)? InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher 2012 as it'd be called)?
Also think about the other side of it. The Acrobat team would be forced to actually secure their reader instead of relying on researchers to do it for them.
I think this can only be a good thing(tm). As Dan Kaminsky once said, "What could possibly go wrong?"
PDF has an open spec and third party developers could make as many PDF readers as they want. Like on Linux, where there are plenty of PDF readers, mostly based on Poppler.
I guess there must be non-Adobe PDF readers for mac.
Apple doesn't license PDF from Adobe even though it is part of OS X's native graphics renderer.
“The Quartz renderer and the PDF interpreter that Apple ships with Mac OS X are built with Apple code, with no external licenses, by Apple employees. Adobe just publishes a specification for how it’s supposed to function. This gives Apple considerably more flexibility with regard to what Quartz and the PDF interpreter can be used for.”
The only way that would happen is if Adobe went crying to the FTC... which they would, which is why Apple offers first-class PDF support in the OS and Microsoft doesn't.
An Adobe acquisition would render this a moot point. Full .PDF support would show up in Windows very quickly, which wouldn't be a bad thing IMO.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadJust saying...
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/
Killing JRun and Cold Fusion would be doing them a favor.
At least with CF and (IIRC) JRun you are not locked into Windows...
Frankly even considering the vendor lock-in implicit in being wed to the MS stack, I'd take that option over CF any day of the week. That said I see no reason to choose between different degrees of poison when there's plenty of good clean water around.
Fundamentalists may differ.
I personally got royally screwed over Nothing Real purchase (we had a site license of both linux and windows version).
Chalice, Shake (and Tremor), Final Cut, Logic, India Pro... - all acquisitions followed by "Mac only from now on, sorry".
Microsoft could use some help in the mobile market, though, so I can believe the idea of those two companies joining forces to make some headway there.
So, while killing CS for Mac might work (users switching platforms might outnumber users switching programs), killing Office for Mac would just force universities to switch to ODF and in the long term, it would hurt the rest of Office's markets.
Sorry, but CS is niche software used by certain professionals. MS Office / Exchange are used by everybody else ;)
And I wouldn't bet against Microsoft for providing an alternative to CS: judging from the experience of using Microsoft Blend, they are rookies, but they can manage it.
Although they have become rather bloated and the last few versions have failed to innovate in significant ways, there is a lot of graphics professionals who would be very reluctant to waste all that hard-won muscle-memory.
Plus there's a lot of work-flow knowledge in them there apps.
On the other hand, it would be a natural fit for someone like Autodesk given their resources and markets. Retail box graphics applications could make sense in Microsoft's product line. Even Corel would be in a position to capitalize on Adobe leaving the Windows market.
Also there was a ton of tension between these companies early in the decade when Adobe was dragging its feet to do Photoshop for OSX.
Adobe has long lost any luster it might have had, and has descended into outsourced maintenance-ware. An acquisition like this would be about as smart as Intel acquiring Mc(rap)fee...
EDIT: aCquisition.
Slightly offtopic but since people are dicussing updates. Updates are an important part of the sotfware lifecycle. It's no big deal that sometimes the updater might need to be updated.
I personally get a bit angry when of all people, software engineers get annoyed about updates. You should know better that the update to software would push better algorithms, reducing CPU and memory usage while it might also have security fixes making software more secure.
Nobody (not even Apple) makes perfect software. There is no such thing as bug free code. Updates fix bugs.
I understand it is a bit psychological too, since people complain more about free updates than paid ones.
Engineers should promote updates amongst friends and family and not deride updates in public.
Then to patch people's computers, they relied on notifications given when visiting websites like ... http://community.adobe.com/help/
It required users to manually download and install a patch :)
edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gURUMv7qZW0#t=1m58s
A lawsuit is like having to beat up somebody to make an example out of him. It only happens when people refuse to pay for protection.
shudder
shudder
http://www.macworld.com/article/154632/2010/10/intel_mobile_...
Just a small detail, but the above bullet exaggerates the indicative reaction of the market. It was up 17 percent for an instant because someone fat fingered and bought it for $30.00 exactly at 3:08pm (Added: 12 minutes after the announcement at 2:56pm), maybe a little excited to buy in. Really it is up 10-11%, which is a strong and positive reaction, but there is more uncertainty factored into the price than what the bullet would seem to imply.
Can you imagine if physical systems worked like that? That observed physical phenomena would change in response to what the experimenter/observer thinks will happen?
Consider a 2-state single particle system, the outcome probabilities of one state vs. the other are fixed by the Hamiltonian and the time evolution of the system, and not by the experimenter's opinion of the system.
That is clearly not true for physical systems.
As a .net dev id love to see them grow the community beyond enterprise.
What I'd love to see is Microsoft buy the Flash/PDF side of the company, and then the creative arm (CS, the type foundry, lightroom, etc) be spun off into an independent company that was once again run by people passionate about design and great software.
The Photoshop/CS part of Adobe is somewhat profitable, correct? Would MS let it go (even for a bucket of cash)?
On a side note, I always thought Autodesk was Adobe's natural predator, I was expecting a buy offer from them.
When I wrote a an XSI plugin for a feature film production, in 2005, for XSI running on Linux, half of the API was still using COM, it the app required a special gcc version that shipped with the sdk to compile plugins with and the Python was ActiveState Python (which clashed with the Linux system's Python). In short, it was a disaster from a developers, and still a lot of trouble from a user's pov.
Now Adobe doesn't support Linux much but if what MS did to XSI is anything to go by, I wouldn't want to be a developer on one of those apps, after the acquisition.
Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.
I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.
It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.
They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.
The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.
Edit: The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.
I'm not sure if this would be considered a successful spin off though as Microsoft bought them when they were, IMHO, at their peak.
Confirmation of what? you don't specify:)
I know there are a few core products that were results of acquisitions, namely PowerPoint and Visio. They've pretty much integrated deeply into Microsoft, so that's always a possibility here.
Fun fact, the first JavaScript was written by a Netscaper in Lisp. The first ActionScript was in Standard ML, and now both guys work on ECMAScript :-) ActionScript's engine powers Mozilla's JS engine (yes, flash and firefox engines off the same code base!) and the Lisper guy works on V8. Get into the javascript scene and you will find the intellectual incest that is hacking.
That wouldn't be too bad, really.
Randal C. Picker, a professor of law of the University of Chicago law school, said in a telephone interview that the technology space is drastically different than it was when Microsoft was originally charged with antitrust violations and an acquisition or partnership of this nature would likely not be halted.
Mr. Picker said that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are focused on other large technology companies and consumer related issues.
[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/microsoft-and-adobe...
Indeed, acquisition is a real and fascinating possibility, but surely there are many other ways they could work together to fight Apple, if that is what they want to do.
[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/microsoft-and-adobe...
Adobe is worth less than half of Facebook? Rolls eyes
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...
It's a bit like old school advertising (billboards, TV) versus Google pay-per-click ads. As soon as you can measure something accurately, it's value decreases.
Sort of like the maxim "Half my advertising works, I just don't know which half." Well, Google let you measure which half, and improve on the other.
Then there's the creative suite. What would happen to photoshop? Dreamweaver (or MS Frontpage 2012 as it'd be renamed)? InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher 2012 as it'd be called)?
Also think about the other side of it. The Acrobat team would be forced to actually secure their reader instead of relying on researchers to do it for them.
I think this can only be a good thing(tm). As Dan Kaminsky once said, "What could possibly go wrong?"
“The Quartz renderer and the PDF interpreter that Apple ships with Mac OS X are built with Apple code, with no external licenses, by Apple employees. Adobe just publishes a specification for how it’s supposed to function. This gives Apple considerably more flexibility with regard to what Quartz and the PDF interpreter can be used for.”
http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/osx_quartz
An Adobe acquisition would render this a moot point. Full .PDF support would show up in Windows very quickly, which wouldn't be a bad thing IMO.