Why Apple Should Acquire Adobe 410
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.'"
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?
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.
Ironic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:As long as they dont do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems unlikely that they would screw it up, but you never know...
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.
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.
Re:Capital Idear, Watts, Capital! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Could they afford it? (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 also might bring in other interested parties (like Microsoft) and create a bidding war for the company.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Re:Apple's out to @#$% Adobe, not buy them. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not quite Photoshop, but it's also 1/10 the price, and does a few very cool things that Photoshop does not, and is blazing fast on my relatively modest machine. For a first version, it's pretty darned impressive.
The GIMP guys really need to take a good hard look at it, and then go cry to themselves in a dark corner.
And I completely second the notion that Adobe's completely lost its focus. Photoshop's turning into a hulking dinosaur, and the rest of their product portfolio is starting to feel quite dated as well. Lightroom's the one innovative thing they've done (and they really just purchased another application and made it their own) -- unfortunately, it's a total CPU and Memory hog that has a tendency to wreck its database about once a month.
Re:Other way around...? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, Adobe shouldn't waste it's time on something like an OS, they should move on to other development areas like audio.
Re:Why Apple should acquire a REAL Time Machine (Score:5, Insightful)
You nailed it. Clearly, we have here somebody who read and followed the instructions outlined yesterday in How to Be a Tech Blowhard [news.com] by Michael Kanellos.
Natural reaction to any blog-sourced article (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Apple's out to @#$% Adobe, not buy them. (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 are very refined tools with immense amount of functionality, and their hooks into each other and into other Adobe products makes them invaluable to a modern graphics pro. Pixelmator and DrawIt may become very powerful applications as time goes on, but it'll take years of serious development in order to catch up.
In the mean time, they're great programs for home users and amateurs. And when I say that, I don't mean to be disregarding. I'm saying they're great programs. And I'm not saying that out of ego, because I'm not a real graphics pro who really takes advantage of Photoshop. But I've supported graphics pros, and sometimes they do some pretty advanced stuff that you can't do very easily without real professional level tools.
Really? (Score:2, Insightful)
But do they really have the cash around to blow on photoshop, flash, etc? That has to be a staggaring amount of money. If I had the multimedia industry as cornered as adobe does, I don't think I'd sell for less than youtube.
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)
Re:Other way around...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither... (Score:2, Insightful)
And neither is Gimp.
Comparing Gimp to Photoshop is like comparing the newest laser printer to a early '90s ink-jet printer.
As for Apple buying Adobe, and then going Apple only - that would burry both companies.
Think about it.
You'd have a de facto industry standard (not to mention household name) that is bought up and switched from "ANY computer in the world"-market to a 5%-world market.
99% market share turned into a 5% market share.
Apples shares wouldn't be worth the ink used to print them.
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.
Re:i used to play this game as a kid... (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.
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.
Re:flamebait (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, Adobe does have lite versions ("Elements") of most of its products. But mostly not on the mac, probably because of the mac freebies already there.
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I type this every time.
Stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
No, We don't need more closed-source (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Very interesting, but very unlikely... (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, so there's a mac version of Autocad/Architectural Desktop/Revit now? No? Microstation? Solidworks? CATIA? Rhino? Alias Studio? 3ds max/VIZ? No?
There's ArchiCAD, Sketchup, and FormZ, and that's pretty much it.
Not that Mac-centric practices don't exist, but it's hardly THE platform.
Re:i used to play this game as a kid... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll argue that Compiz was slowing things down, and the Beryl fork kept things going.
Look at XFree86 and X.org. XFree86 changed licensing and each and every single distro switched to Xorg. If an OSS project makes a bad decision or stagnates where it shouldn't, someone WILL come along and fork it to keep things moving along. If the distros like the fork, they'll move over to it.
Truth is they may both be good Desktops but are really quite polarized in philosophy and scope. It's not quite that simple.
But again, competition between the two keeps things going along quite nicely.
No, I don't want to install iTunes w/ Adobe Reader (Score:2, Insightful)
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...
Re:Tag: stupidpundit (Score:1, Insightful)
Time Machine has never been based on ZFS. Two years ago at WWDC they explained in the Time Machine sessions how it was built on HFS+J, hard links (For files and directories), and the fsevent APIs.