Should Apple Buy Adobe?

[MacFabulous]

SHOULD APPLE BUY ADOBE? - I say YES!!!!!

MacDailyNews runs an article about this and about ADOBE´s possible venture into the office suite market.

Interesting i think!

The article below:

Adobe set to take plunge into office apps? (Should Apple buy Adobe?)
Tuesday, August 14, 2007 - 06:15 PM EDT

"When considering what your spreadsheets and documents might look like on the always-on desktop of the future, don't leave Adobe out of the picture,; Michael Calore reports for Wired.

"The software maker famous for Flash and Photoshop is poised to take the plunge into the lucrative world of office applications. It may sound far-fetched at first, but the stage is set for Adobe to flex its muscle in the office-app arena. The company already has a strong presence in business software with its Acrobat suite of products and interest in its new platform for web-enabled applications that run on the desktop is rising quickly," Calore reports.

Calore reports, "According to Adobe group manager for platform evangelism, Mike Downey, it wouldn't be outlandish to predict the company throws its hat into the ring soon. 'Though we have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office-productivity software market,' he says, 'considering we have built this platform that makes it easy to build rich applications that run on both the desktop and the browser, I certainly wouldn't rule anything like that out.'"

Calore reports, "Microsoft all but owns the space right now -- its Office suite consisting of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook is the die-hard first choice of the corporate world -- but Redmond has been slow to react to the growing popularity of web apps and alternatives to its stable of dinosaurs."

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Yet another reason why Apple should buy Adobe - beyond acquiring Photoshop et al. and eliminating Windows support, of course (as Apple did with Shake). There's nothing like a nice hostile takeover to spice up the autumn season.

[UPDATE: 6:30pm EDT: Looks like CNET's Matt Asay agrees, "The only thing better would be if Adobe, Apple, and OpenOffice could get together. Open source plus two of the most innovative makers of software in the industry...I'm salivating. (In fact, don't you think that it makes a lot of sense for Apple to acquire Adobe, given the similar corporate mentalities/competencies? Me, too.) ...Microsoft should be very concerned.


Apple can gain a lot of knowledge from apps like photoshop, premiere, "the acrobat´s" and other apps alike. As creative developers these two companies (Apple-Adobe) locked together, would make some awesome powerfull and unbeatable apps.

I say goooo!!!! MS would be scared as hell! And understandable so!!!

 

[Aea]

They probably should, but then there's conflicts (eg supporting windows + OSX), and excessive colors are... excessive

Granted I do see it happening as both companies are pretty close.

 

[PlaceofDis]

won't happen and i surely don't want it to happen. i just want Apple and Adobe to stay on good terms with one another.

i could see lots of lawsuits and the like if it were to happen.

 

[seany916]

Yes. Then Adobe would finally answer my phone calls. Anyone ever tried to contact Adobe by phone? It takes forever, the calls mysteriously get dropped when they don't have an answer, and you always end up with someone who transfers you to another person who also can't help you.

If Adobe has a problem with this post, they can contact me directly. I STILL have an issue that is unresolved from over a year ago.

Running CS2 currently. Won't buy their products again until they actually have some kind of customer service.

Apple would change that.

 

[filmgirl]

Yeah, my first instinct was "HELL NO!" - at least from a consumer standpoint. We have Final Cut because the guy that "created" Premiere and led the development team through Premiere 4 (and that was the last well-written Premiere, at least IMO - Premiere 5 was just buggy and slow and NOT good - and it only got worse with 6) started working on a new program for Macromedia - and when Macromedia sold that company, Apple bought them to prevent competition, renamed it and took over product development. Final Cut's success has put a chink in Adobe's overall armor of design invincibility - and competition breeds innovation - it's as simple as that. While I've been impressed with how Adobe has handled the Macromedia acquisition as a whole (they left the dev teams intact), the downside of that purchase was that Adobe lost it's only major competitor in the design field - and that can stifle innovation. Microsoft is attempting some pretty cool stuff with Expression Web (I like it better than Dreamweaver, in any event) - but it isn't aimed at the same target audience and they have a rough history with design (Front Page is what most people remember and Front Page was awful). Corel has a good consumer tool in Paint Shop Pro, but it will never compete with Photoshop. That leaves Apple (and possibly Avid - if they wanted to expand past video production, though they have no reason to want to do that) as the only viable contender for design applications and I fear that joining the two together would eliminate a lot of the innovation that is necessary for this kind of business.



Even from a business standpoint, it makes little sense. I'd be interested in seeing how much money Adobe makes off of Windows software vs. Mac (I'd bet they make a lot more off of Windows, even though they started as a Mac software company) and that is a huge issue. Apple doesn't seem to want to expand their breadth of Windows compatible apps too far past iTunes and Safari (and Safari for Windows is a joke - FireFox owns that niche and that is not going to change), because their software is an incentive for people to buy the hardware and if they did buy Adobe, that would put them in an awkward position of having to develop and support product lineups for the Windows OS. They couldn't pull a Shake and discontinue Windows versions, the public would freak out and it would completely devalue the purchase -- it would be like throwing away more than half of whatever Apple would have to pay for Adobe (and it would be in the billions anyway - this is not some cheapass company). Why anyone would write that Apple could ever even seriously consider doing that as a legitimate business move is just flat out stupid. Apple is a public company and they don't have enough money to say FU to a huge sector of Adobe's client base. But that's assuming Apple would even want to purchase the company. Honestly, the company that has the money to do it, if for self-preservation if nothing else, is Microsoft. If anyone makes a hostile takeover bid on Adobe, it would be them, at least from my perspective.

As for Adobe's foray into Office apps, so many companies have tried to get into the Office Suite game over the years, Novell, Lotus, Corel, Apple - but no one can touch Microsoft because they are the standard. Office isn't the best, but it is the best Office Suite. If anyone could be a contender - it would be Adobe because Acrobat is pretty much the only app that leads it's MS counterpart. Now, Word and other programs have to have Acrobat support built-in (and they do work really well together) and vice-versa, but Acrobat is still the defacto standard for portable documents. And that is yet another reason why Microsoft would be the much more likely candidate - they already integrate aspects of Adobe's product lineup into theirs.

 

[MisterMe]

...

Apple would change that.

Adobe has long been a very mercurial company. It makes some great products. However, it also buys other companies and allows their product lines to languish and die. An Apple purchase of Adobe would bring some much needed discipline and focus to the company.