Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe

aabode writes "OSWeekly.com's Brandon Watts suggests that Apple should acquire Adobe. Why? 'While Apple has done a great job of developing media applications for beginners (the iLife suite is a good example of this), they could use a boost on the professional side. Granted, Final Cut Studio has become the standard when it comes to professional video editing, and Logic Studio is a great professional solution for editing audio, but what about the graphics and Web design segments of the market? If people want tools to support these interests on the Mac, then they turn to Adobe.'"

What?

I really fail to see why this is interesting.

Re:Apple leads share in key Adobe markets

Here's a tally of my local graphic arts/publishing/advertising-related colleagues (within a 10 mile radius of my ad agency), off the top of my head, based on my personal familiarly with the shop setups. I'm in a small suburban community just outside Dallas/Ft. Worth. Where I just list "Mac" or "Windows" it means that all the creative/graphic arts production computers are of that platform. Note that many of these companies (especially the newspapers) run other departments (such as Accounting) on other platforms.

1. Daily newspaper: 5 workstations. Mac
2. Daily newspaper: 4 workstations. Mac
3. Weekly newspaper: 4 workstations. 3 Macs, 1 Windows
4. Monthly magazine: 2 workstations. Mac
5. Print shop: 3 workstations. 2 Macs, 1 Windows
6. Print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
7. Weekly newspaper: 7 workstations. Mac
8. Print shop: 2 workstations. Mac
9. Design studio: 2 workstations. Mac
10. Commercial print shop: 1 workstation. Mac
11. PR agency, 2 workstations. Windows
12. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
13. Design studio: 1 workstation. Mac
14. Advertising agency (me). 5 workstations: 1 Linux, 1 Windows, 3 Macs.

Just as a note, the PR agency which has two Windows machines vends almost all of their graphic design work to other shops, although they tried real hard the first year in business to do all their design work in-house. The weekly newspaper which has the one Windows machine is finding that the Windows PC is currently being unused, although this changes from time to time depending on whether they have any designers currently employed who feel.

I used to do a detailed survey of graphic arts-related businesses and their platform choices for the Dallas/Ft. Worth area many years ago, generated by laboriously calling all 900+ businesses listed in the phone directories. The tally was always 98%+ in favor of Mac, but I haven't done the survey in years now. Anecdotally, I interface with some 50 other pre-press shops and publishing houses (where I send the ads I design for clients) and I still get the impression that the industry is overwhelmingly Mac. One reason this may be is that Windows has had some well-documented flaws in Microsoft's Postscript drivers (starting with WindowsXP) and also in the way Windows handles ICC color profile files. Several of the pre-press houses I deal with have Windows machines solely for the purpose of handling CorelDraw files from customers; the front-end machines to the imagesetters are invariably Mac.

I'm not sure who in the graphic arts industry is keeping platform talleys these days. Used to be that the PIA (Printing Industries of America) was a good source of information, along with Seybold Reports. I've had a Seybold subscription in recent years but not seen any hard stats on graphic arts platform usage.

Page layout app of choice still seems to be QuarkXPress over InDesign with about 60% of the market for those folks who do complex page builds with lots of text (newspapers and magazines, for example). InDesign seems to be rapidly catching up, however. Most popular vector program still seems to be Illustrator and, as always, Photoshop is the preferred bitmap editor.

Now, for Web work, however, where no cross-media placement is involved, Windows machines seem to dominate. This is just a guess, but I'd say that Windows has 80%+ of the local Web designers' platforms that I'm familiar with.

_ _ _

All my life, I always wanted to be somebody. Now I see that I should have been more specific.
—Jane Wagner

Re:Apple leads share in key Adobe markets

The thing is, print and prepress are steeply declining. Magazines are getting thinner, readership is dropping for everything from porn to popular science; why pay for month old news and views when you can get it tonight, for free, up to the second, on the web?

We spent literally years building extensive prepress into our products until we had a more flexible and more powerful model than Photoshop had, something able to flex further and simply get a better print result by virtue of better control over the various print issues like allowing a mix of UCR and GCR approaches, more flexible and easier to use color separation models; and it used to be that a lot of our customers were very into getting that last bit of quality through the printshop and onto the paper.

No longer. Our userbase continues to increase, but a goodly number of our old print customers have moved on to web-centric undertakings and we hear from relatively fewer new print people. I can't say I'm disappointed, a prepress person tends to need a lot more care and support than a web designer does, all other things being equal.

The problem that a company like Adobe faces is that very little of what Photoshop does is all that hard to find in less expensive software. Apple knows this; buying Adobe would simply be buying a name, because the underlying technology is no mystery to anyone. Apple's already facing Adobe directly with the Aperture / Lightroom product pair - if Apple wants an imaging product, there are comparably powerful engines out there already, or they could devote a couple of savvy imaging people and a GUI person to the project and they'd have something significant in a year or so. As opposed to spending how much for Adobe? Jobs is a pain in the ass, particularly when he gets distracted by consumer gear such as phones and mpeg players, but I've never heard him successfully characterized as actually being stupid with regard to the computer business.

In the end, if you lift up the rock the prepress people live under, you're going to find a lot of dead and dying critters. Print just isn't that big a deal any more other than to the shrinking demographic who are invested in it for whatever reason.

Web graphics, animation, video, photography - Apple's already prodding these markets. Do they really need Adobe? I can't see that they do.

flamebait

and at least half the people using your product are using pirated versions

That is irrelevant to any comparison between Mac and PC.

but their weak pathetic market share is the reason Adobe abandoned the platform

Inaccurate and inflammatory. Adobe has not abandoned the platform, they elected not to port Premier or Framemaker and have a few fringe apps that are Windows-only. Either that, or my recollection of having CS3 installed on my Mac at home is the result of delusional psychosis.

that seems like any investment in the platform is a waste of time and money.

That is a baseless conclusion. I find it difficult to believe that it is a "waste of time and money" (i.e., an unprofitable endeavor), since they continue to make new versions of their core products for the Mac and show no signs of stopping.

Adobe has thrived after dumping Apple.

Again, they only dumped support for a few major applications (good alternatives to which exist on the platform already), and secondly, I fail to see any causal link between the two.

Apple would buy a profitable Adobe, then just strap them into making software to stuff into Apple's $150 OSX service packs.

I don't know if it's fair to call them service packs, because I was a lot more excited about any of them than XP SP2. Furthermore, that's an unreasonable conclusion. iLife is basically just Logic Pro Lite, Final Cut Pro Lite, a photo album and a web authoring tool. In the case of the professional apps, full versions do, in fact, exist. What would be more likely to happen in that situation is that every Adobe application would be forked into a home version and a pro version, just like with the other apps.

I basically agree that it's pointless for Apple to acquire Adobe, but your post was just littered with so many half-truths, twisted facts and blatant omissions that I had to break it down.

Re:Adobe kicked Apple to the curb for a reason

1) Recent slashdot articles have claimed that Mac is at about 5% now
2) The fact that 50% use a pirated version (even if true) is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Now, if you claim that 50% of Apple users use a pirated version... well, that would at least be relevant.
3) A lot of the Windows computers out there are office computers that wouldn't be using this anyway. The percentage that's important is the Apple market share amongst professionals, which is most likely *very* different than the standard market share number.

i used to play this game as a kid...

monopoly, it was real fun...

Re:i used to play this game as a kid...

Thank you. There should be competition among proprietary products, that is the only way that they improve.

The Game of Monopoly

No, this wouldn't be the game of Monopoly, but it would be a familiar Wall Street game of corporate take-over... and a stupid one at that.

After the Time Warner / AOL fiasco has resolved into a case of "what were they thinking!?!" and BEA smartly tells Oracle to stuff it, let's look at the idea of Apple taking over Adobe.

First of all, Apple is a company that CEO Steve Jobs has somehow managed to steer into remarkable growth. Ten years ago they merged and integrated with NeXT. Probably not all that hard since both were Steve's babies and both were geographically located in the same place and both were relatively small in terms of staff size. I'm sure the corporate culture transformation had its bumps, but not too bad.

Just imagine merging Apple and Adobe, which I believe is housed in Seattle. Now we're talking about a two-campus company, rewriting the corporate management style-guide, firing sales staff and overlapping departments, yada yada yada. That would be mess #1.

Then think about the move of the Adobe code to Apple technology standards. Only an idiot would think Photoshop needs to be re-written as a Cocoa app. Do you really think we would get a better version of Creative Suite 4 next technology cycle? The new product development plans would evolve into mess #2.

Apple does what it does well: they REALLY innovate and focus on User Interface evolution. They see software market opportunities (Final Cut Pro, iLife, Aperture, etc.) and they expand their product line slowly and carefully. They are for the computer industry what Southwest Airlines has been for the Airline Industry for the past 30 years. If they bought Adobe (and other vulnerable software companies) "just because" without any strategy or focus they would become as irrelevant as Sony or Microsoft are becoming.

Now what would be nice would be seeing them slowly and steadily applying their cash into the hiring and development of the best & brightest of computer programming (and hardware engineering and design) talent. Don't buy Adobe and get stuck with some brilliant and some mediocre programmers; poach the top talent away from Adobe with top paychecks. That's my Good Idea #1.

I have one more Good Idea #2: create an incubation machine that finds programming talent and innovative spirit and spins off small software companies that can write incredible native-Apple killer apps. Apple has the corporate strategy, the design methodology, and the technology. They also exist in only one geographic location in the country. (And I, a developer in New York City, would kill for an opportunity to do Apple-platform development without moving to CA.) And I will agree that there are many apps and utilities that are needed--especially in the business/corporate IT niche--that exceed what the small Shareware developers can manage. If Apple could spin-off smaller Apple subsidiaries that had a stronger link to "the mothership", and if Apple invested some of its cash reserves into ongoing but cash-strapped projects (Gimp and OpenOffice are real, albeit imperfect, examples) we might get somewhere.

The really interesting challenge will be if Apple can grow in size while avoiding the bureaucratic morass that large corporations so often become. We shall see what the future holds...

Other way around...?

If you ask me, Adobe shouldn't be looking to be acquired by an OS-maker. Instead, Adobe should be looking to acquire an OS.

I've been working in IT for various kinds of media companies, and in a lot of cases, there are people whose entire jobs are centered around using Adobe apps. You could throw Adobe CS3 on any system and any OS, and those people would still be able to do their jobs just fine. The OS doesn't matter.

So let's say Adobe develops their own Linux/BSD variant or buys someone else's. With very little work on their end, they could actually become a competitor to Microsoft. What often keeps linux from a lot of desktop these days is the lack of specific professional media applications. Adobe could make their own port of OpenOffice/Evolution/Linux, bundle that with Adobe CS3, and have a pretty formidable media/business desktop OS.

Re:Other way around...?

What would they gain from that?

The goal of a corporation in capitalism is to maximize their profit. They would have to invest massively in developing and maintaining a OS and wouldn't get much more revenue, so what's the point?

Re:Other way around...?

What they would gain is true platform independence. Right now, they do a lot to support Microsoft in MS's battle against Linux. Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to screw Adobe over by creating competing applications and formats. Long-term, it's a losing proposition for Adobe. If Microsoft manages to displace PDF, Photoshop, and Flash (as is Microsoft's goal), Adobe will be severely hurt.

If they were able to support Linux/Unix (beyond OSX), then Microsoft would have a harder time forcing users into using the competing Microsoft products. Right now, if Microsoft changes their OS to break PDF while pushing their own format, it's still at the point where they could theoretically get people to drop PDF. It's not likely, but it's possible, since Adobe is still so tied to MS.

So, in short, Adobe is reliant on Microsoft and Apple to deliver their applications to users. Being able to put their apps on an open-source platform is potentially valuable. However, supporting Linux/BSD is complicated by all the different distros. They'd probably have to pick a distro to support, and at that point, they may as well take a particular distro and brand their own branded version. They could still rely on the open source community for security updates and the like, but it would enable them to build flash/PDF into the OS in interesting ways, possibly improving efficiency.

Anyway, I'm not saying it will happen or even that it should happen. I'm just saying that, if I were running Adobe, I'd be more interested in branding my own version of Linux (while continuing to make my applications for Windows and OSX) than I would be in making my products OSX-only or Windows-only. I think that if I ran Adobe, I'd probably have some level of internal development for Linux in case Ubuntu actually managed to grab some market share.

Re:Other way around...?

You've seen a very limited segment of Adobe's market then. In my industry (3D animation) an artist may have Photoshop, Illustrator, 3dsmax, Maya, or any number of other packages (much of it by Autodesk) open at once. Clearly they all need to be on the same OS. This is also why IMHO Adobe needs to look long and hard at porting their products to Linux - animation shops are now moving in a huge way towards Linux workstations (better integration with 'nix render farms, among other things). If anything Adobe wants to buy Autodesk (or the other way around), since those tools are so closely tied together.

As long as they dont do...

...what they did with Emagic. Emagic Logic, lovely music sequencing program, worked on Windows and Macs. Apple buy them up, first thing they do, "sorry guys, its going Mac only".

  Now, if they do that with Adobe software, what do you think will happen?

re: EMagic Logic

Well, this was *probably* done as a retaliatory move on Apple's part, as much as anything. Apple traditionally had a good foothold in the MIDI music, sequencing, and hard disk recording sectors - but Windows-only products were eating away at their market share. (Think products like Cakewalk Sonar, for example, or ACID Pro, or Gigastudio.)

Furthermore, some of the music gear out there was starting to only include Windows software for the purpose of editing or cataloging sound patches. (I remember buying a Yamaha Motif synthesizer a few years ago, and the only Mac software tools it included were for Mac OS 9.x only. OS X support was "coming soon" for pretty much the whole time I owned it.)

Apple wanted to create at least one more good reason to choose a Mac as a musician.

With Adobe, it's a whole different situation. For starters, Adobe uses their own methods of software development, which appear to be Windows-centric. (All of their new apps for OS X are supporting Intel Mac only, as opposed to "Universal binaries" that work with PPC Macs too. That would indicate they're not writing this stuff with Apple's xcode tools at all, but rather, doing some kind of ports directly over from their Windows versions.) I don't think Apple would want to buy out an entire product line that they'd have to re-code using xcode, before it would even be up to the standards they endorse of supporting both architectures.

Very interesting, but very unlikely...

Pros and Cons:

Pros: establishes Apple as THE platform for photographers and designers by removing the Windows competition. Sure, Apple could continue to fund the development of Photoshop and Illustrator for Windows. But the latest and greatest version would always appear on the Macintosh first.

Cons: even with its current pile of money (iPhone and Ipod are two very successful products after all), I am not sure Apple has enough money to buy Adobe. Not to mention Microsoft would certainly file an anti-trust suit. It also raises all kind of legal snafus in Europe for instance, which would certainly frown upon it.

Cons: Postscript and PDF are both open standards. I am not sure I'd like to see Apple control their future.

So, yes, and interesting prospect. Still pretty unlikely, though.

Re:Very interesting, but very unlikely...

Not to mention Microsoft would certainly file an anti-trust suit

Oh, that'll be rich.

MS Lawyer: Your honor, this deal will create a monopoly for Apple.
Judge: I don't quite see it, please elaborate.
MS Lawyer: Trust us, if anyone knows anything about being a monopoly, it's Microsoft and--
[kicked in shins by Ballmer and Gates]
um, I mean, we have some experience with dealing with other monopolies like Linux, for example.

Re:Very interesting, but very unlikely...

What the hell does stock price have to do with anything?

Market capitalization might be useful, but the price of share is completely fucking useless, since they don't have the same number of outstanding shares.

Bundle with Quicktime!!!

I was wondering if there was a way to make Flash, Quicktime, and PDFs work WORSE than they already do... the answer: Obviously you should bundle them together.

Imagine an app that takes over ALL file extensions on every windows box, makes it impossible to look at any image, any document, and any web page!

I always thought that the fact that iTunes/Quicktime basically destroy windows PCs was a calculated move. I could never understand why Adobe Reader had a simmilar effect. If you could do the same to Flash it would be the last nail in the coffin for the home user of Windows. Since he who controls flash controls the civilian entertain-web, I would be surprised if there was not a google, MS, Apple bidding war for them. I am actually suprised it hasn't happened yet.

There has been nothing in the past that I have though had the power to kill Windows for the home user than a version of flash that plain does not work right on the PC, like Reader and Quicktime before it.

Why Apple should acquire a REAL Time Machine

Sometimes its fun to write an entire column based on an incredibly unlikely and impractical idea. If we are going to make up crap based on conversations with our wives, I propose Apple buys a real Time Machine, goes back in time to 3000 years ago and begins a superior civilization in the North Americas, so that we have populated the Galaxy by tomorrow. And one more thing... Super Intelligent Llamas.

Any other fricken fantasy stories we need to get promoted as actual 'News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters'?

Re:Why Apple should acquire a REAL Time Machine

Sometimes its fun to write an entire column based on an incredibly unlikely and impractical idea....

You nailed it. Clearly, we have here somebody who read and followed the instructions outlined yesterday in How to Be a Tech Blowhard [news.com] by Michael Kanellos.

Ironic...

...how someone can suggest this when the most basic but most widely-used Adobe product, Flash player, is a giant flaming CPU-hogging turd in OS X.

Re:Ironic...

MOD PARENT UP

I don't really understand why it doesn't get more attention, but the Mac OS X Adobe Flash player has to easily be one of the worst pieces of software ever written.

CPU spikes up to 100% are common if a flash banner ad loads. Youtube will suck the life out of even a recent Core Duo Intel Mac. Loading a page on MySpace can sometimes render the system useless for a few minutes.

Thank God for FlashBlock [mozdev.org].

Come to think of it, most of Adobe's codebase is very poorly supported on the Mac. Even Photoshop is starting to feel quite dated.

Re:Ironic...

Because the two most widely-used Adobe products, Flash player and Acrobat Reader, are both flaming CPU-hogging turds on whatever OS they're on.

Why Apple needs to buy (insert company)?

Cause the writer of the article has stock in (company) and wants to make a quick buck...

I know I've seen this same headline with Nintendo there, and I can't help but think there've been others. I just don't care enough to search. If Apple wanted to buy something, they'd buy it. I think Apple's pretty happy where they are though.

Gee, lets make both companies suck EVEN more!

Adobe's products have gotten insanely bloated and crappy the past 5 years, and Apple isn't doing much better either. Quicktime and Itunes love to autorun 8 tons of horsecrap, and Adobe does the same + does a bunch of bullshit activation too. Acrobat Reader has become such a disaster that anyone with a clue has dumped it for Foxit (We just did that at work for 500+ workstations, and we are HEAVY users of the pdf format).

I can see it now. Adobe Quicktime Version 13 Profesional will have 5 autostart services, have mandatory bullshit activation every time it's actively used + background activation every 60 minutes, hijack all your multimedia settings, require 2 gigabytes of disk space and 4 gigabytes of ram, and kill your dog for good measure.

Why not TiVo?

Adobe makes sense as an acquisition, but more people watch TV than use Photoshop. And, of course, Apple is moving more into consumer electronics. They should buy TiVo, redo the interface in a slick Apple way, and link it to the iTunes Movie Store. At the same time, sell them alongside big, beautiful Apple-brand HDTVs with well-designed connections and controls, which is a weak point on other HDTVs.

Also, come out with some sort of mini-tower Mac in between (in cost and features) the Mini and the Mac Pro....

Web Development?

Don't vim and emacs run on OSX?

Do one thing well

At least that's what our department head, the guy with advanced degrees in engineering and marketing, says. His claim is: companies that buy other companies who do something similar end up diluting themselves and losing maneuverability.
Apple's already designing hardware *and* operating systems *and* lots of applications. Do they need to spend money on *more* applications, when those applications are currently being managed by someone else who knows how to market them, and whose marketing helps drive Apple's sales effectively for free?

Opportunity Costs

While it might seem that Adobe would make a good acquisition for Apple there are several factors weighing against it IMHO. First, the price for Adobe, now that it includes the assets of the former Macromedia combined with the many successful core Adobe products, would be very high indeed for Apple. Apple might do better by reserving such a large chunk of their available investment capital, assuming that they could finance the purchase (haven't checked the respective balance sheets of the companies, but Yahoo Finance [yahoo.com] could probably get someone a ballpark estimate if they were interested), for internal R&D, improvements to their core products, OSX Leopard for example, and especially their profitable iPhone and iPod hardware sales and services which brings up the second and main point:

The iPhone, iPod, and iTun