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Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Nov 02, 2007 12:14 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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Submission: Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe by Anonymous Coward
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What? (Score:3, Interesting)
Tag: stupidpundit (Score:3, Interesting)
Here's one big collective stupidpundit story: when Leopard came out, a bunch of pundits crowed that it was a big leap forward, filesystemwise. Why? Because Leopard has gone over to ZFS as the main file system, and ZFS is the first really new file system in decades.
Except that Leopard hasn't gone over to ZFS. It doesn't even support read-write access to ZFS. Why did so many pundits get it so wrong?
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.
Parent
Re:Adobe kicked Apple to the curb for a reason (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Parent
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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i used to play this game as a kid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:i used to play this game as a kid... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But if for some reason the source code *must* be kept secret, then there *must* be competition or the code will stagnate.
The Game of Monopoly (Score:4, Insightful)
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...
Parent
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
All is a bit strong a word. Some of their video apps are intel only (After Effects is Universal), all the rest (including all the apps from Design/Web collections) are universal.
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, Funny)
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Ironic... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not quite Photoshop, but it's also 1/10 the price, and does a few very cool things that Photoshop does not, and is blazing fast on my relatively modest machine. For a first version, it's pretty darned impressive.
The GIMP guys really need to take a good hard look at it, and then go cry to themselves in a dark corner.
And I completely second the notion that Adobe's completely lost its focus. Photoshop's turning into a hulking dinosaur, and the rest of their pr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Really those applications are the result (I think, maybe I'm wrong?) of Apple giving developers CoreImage, thereby lowering the entry barrier for making a graphics application. However, they're really not up to the level of competing with Photoshop/Illustrator for professional tools. At least not yet.
People who don't understand why Adobe is so dominant are the people who don't understand the difference between editing some GIFs for your webpage vs. being a graphic design pro. Photoshop and Illustrator a
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
But Core Image has lowered the barrier so much that these applications are introduced as good products, and have time to gradually build the features that casual Photoshop users need. They'll never replace Photoshop for everyone, but I bet over the next few years they can replace Photoshop for all but the most serious professionals.
Over time, these tools will become as alike Photoshop as they want to be. Hopefully, though, the devel
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
Do things WELL, not "do everything" (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It boils down to this: Pick the battles you can win.
Quick, everyone, let's jump in the wayback machine to the 90's, when Apple "made" just about everything under the sun. And was doing a pretty shit job of it, and suffering for it. Part of what brought back Apple was Steve saying "what the fuck are we doing making digital cameras and a dozen different desktop computers?" They dropped all the shit products Apple was screwing around with, and simplified the product line down to just two laptop models and three desktops, all with clearly delineated target audiences and design.
Apple has benefited for two reasons: their business capabilities are not diluted as much, and consumers find the buying experience easier and simpler.
I've needed to buy a new bike and a cell phone recently. Both industries are chock full of companies that will offer you DOZENS of different products that are all every so slightly different; go look at Nokia's website sometime. Fifty goddamn phones, when really there's only 3-4 categories of 'em.
Apple has acquired sotware packages and such when (I believe) they felt it would benefit the platform, or there was a deal to be had. This is the same reasoning behind the various Apple peripherals we were inundated with in the 90's; nobody else made a good Appletalk laser printer, so Apple said "dammit, we'll do it ourselves." It made sense to some degree, bolstered by the fact that schools liked to buy everything from one place. It's nice to be able to get everything for your gradeschool lab from one place. To some degree.
That's the challenge I think Apple will face in the future: not getting caught up in too many product areas trying to support the platform, to the extent that both the core hardware suffers and the sideline stuff no longer becomes compelling.
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.
Adobe's apps are mostly Carbon (Score:3, Insightful)
If Apple could've purchased a company, I wish it'd been Macromedia before Adobe got to them, and I _still_ wish that FreeHand had been saved one last time and that Adobe had been required to divest themselves of it.
Apple really should haul out the old Sketch.app code and update it to a nice modern drawing program, ideally one as efficient and productive as FreeHand.
William
(who needs to find the time to dig into Cenon's, http://www.cenon.info/ [cenon.info] codebase)
Not that bad an idea. (Score:3, Insightful)
Beg to differ (Score:4, Insightful)
Final Cut Studio has become the standard when it comes to professional video editing
FCP is very popular and making inroads to some pro shops but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "the standard" in professional video editing. Avid is still very popular in broadcast shops and Adobe still has a fair number of Premiere users out there. I'd go up against any of them with Sony Vegas. I'd give FCP the upper-middle range.
If anyone should buy Adobe it should be Sony. Then they could both change their name to Sonobe One, which sounds like a Star Wars character.
Apple was an early Adobe investor; sold its stake (Score:3, Informative)
But Apple designed its own font architecture for System 7, which was released in 1992. This was the now-familiar TrueType. I'm not real clear on the details, but I guess Apple and Adobe couldn't agree on font architectures, with Adobe preferring to stick with its Postscript fonts, so Apple sold its stock in Adobe. If my memory is correct, they made $69 million.
Apple had at first announced that the Adobe Type Manager (ATM) software wouldn't work on System 7, as it was an extension, or "INIT", that installed a lot of patches in the OS. But after a widespread outcry, Apple relented and worked with Adobe to enable compatibility. Apple always hated INITs, as they prevented Apple from changing low-level APIs that would have broken the INITs' binary compatibility.
No, We don't need more closed-source (Score:3, Insightful)
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:4, Insightful)
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?
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Re:Other way around...? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Other way around...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe has a market cap of 27.36 billion dollars.
Apple has cash reserves of 15 billion dollars and no debt. Apple also made 24 billion dollars in revenue this year (3.5 billion net income).
If Apple wanted to buy Adobe, and didn't mind taking on some debt temporarily, they could.
I don't think they will. I also don't think Adobe would be particularly interested in selling. An attempt to do so a