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Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Nov 02, 2007 01:14 PM
from the maybe-one-day-they'll-care-about-games-too dept.
from the maybe-one-day-they'll-care-about-games-too dept.
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.'"
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Firehose:Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe by Anonymous Coward
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i used to play this game as a kid... (Score:5, Insightful)
As long as they dont do... (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, if they do that with Adobe software, what do you think will happen?
re: EMagic Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Very interesting, but very unlikely... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Bundle with Quicktime!!! (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Ironic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ironic... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Why Apple needs to buy (insert company)? (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Funny)
Do one thing well (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPhone, iPod, and iTunes angles are so profitable for Apple that it would be hard to justify NOT investing the maximum available capital or the last available profitable investment dollar (where marginal return exceeds marginal cost of investing one more dollar) into the expanding entertainment hardware and media business. The opportunity cost [wikipedia.org] of buying Adobe instead of or at the expense of continued investment in the profitable iPhone, iPod, and iTunes markets may simply be too high, even though Adobe might be a good fit for Apple at least conceptually, to justify.
Disclaimer: I am neither an Apple nor an Adobe shareholder and I have no personal financial interest in either company.
Apple's out to @#$% Adobe, not buy them. (Score:5, Interesting)
Within the bounds of reason... (Score:5, Informative)
ADBE's market cap is 16% (27 Billion) of AAPL's market cap (167 Billion). APPL has $15 Billion in cash on the books, so this couldn't be an all cash deal, but it could be a mix of stock and cash or an all stock deal.
It is worth considering an AAPL acquisition of ADBE. Of course, AAPL would have to offer a premium. If I was putting together the deal, I would offer 1 AAPL share for 4 ADBE shares and $10 a share in cash.
This would value ADBE at 46.75 + $10 = $56.75 a share. This is an 18% permium to today's price. That is a reasonable premium on ADBE's current valuation.
Yours,
Jordan
Natural reaction to any blog-sourced article (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple has lots of cash (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple has a pretty compelling story just now. They have a new OS with tools developers are excited about using. The Mac is gaining market share, so developers are more inclined to write software for the platform. That should include Adobe. However, much of Adobe's software is written using Apple's 32-bit Carbon framework. It will be an expensive proposition for Adobe to move forward and develop new 64-bit Cocoa versions of their code.
If Apple could positively determine that Adobe was not going to make this investment it might make sense for them to buy them to make sure that it happened. Adobe software is hugely important to Apple--look at how many people held off making the transition to Intel Macs until CS3 was ready. Apple is not a huge company, employee-wise. They could eventually develop competing products at the cost of increasing their number of employees, a lead time to market and risking incompatibility with the existing market standard. Given those terms, purchasing Adobe could be the cheaper option.
But unless Adobe plans to abandon the Mac this purchase wouldn't make much sense for Apple.
Other way around...? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Other way around...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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flamebait (Score:5, Informative)
That is irrelevant to any comparison between Mac and PC.
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 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.
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.
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.
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Re:Apple leads share in key Adobe markets (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Re:Apple leads share in key Adobe markets (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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