Pixelmator would slot nicely into the same consumer set of productivity apps that ship with all Macs (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). Photomator will get them back into the market they abandoned when Aperture was shuttered.
Speaking of Aperture… am I the only person who remembers that Apple owns Claris? Why didn't Apple just hand off Aperture to Claris and say "just keep this thing working on new MacOS releases"?
Never understood the logic of getting rid of it. I know a few people who actually switched to mac because of Aperture
Me neither… I wanted to like Lightroom, which was the solution most of the community seemed to migrate to, but between the infuriating inconsistent UI and the predatory subscription model I did not use it for long. And now I have a Rube Goldberg thing that is janky and feels brittle.
I reluctantly went to Photos, mainly because of ease of use on the phone for family members, but still I miss full tagging and smart album support.
Yes! And plugins are great, but the experience is not smooth, and quickly annoying when working with many photos. Also, switching libraries is not good. I wish it were more integrated because on paper, a photo management app combining the features of Affinity, DxO, and others sounds fantastic.
In the past decade these apps even disappeared from their main menu on Apple.com where they used to have a prominent spot.
Can you point to a newer acquisition of great software that is still being developed?
The difference here is how aligned the original team is with their acquirer...down to the corner radius on every button.
With other products like Dark Sky, the product is substantially different in philosophy or design.
They used to have Aperture competing with Lightroom and then decided pro photography wasn’t a space they needed to be in, has something changed where now they want their own Photoshop competitor?
I do hope they'll offer Pixelmator as an included app on Macs and Pixelmator Pro alongside Logic, Finalcut, and other "Pro" software. The lack of a built-in image editor can be annoying.
Photos works for some stuff, Preview includes basic adjustments too, but sometimes you just want something like a hue/saturation adjustment instead of color temperature and pink/green tint, or multiple layers so you can experiment with different edits non-destructively.
In particular, if you have the average user Pixelmator, they’d be worse off. The same isn’t really true with weather or darksky - they really just do the same thing.
We still have iMovie and FinalCut, GarageBand and Logic. Apple has kept two different product lines before.
It's also not impossible that Apple moves a few of Pixelmator's tools into Photos but kills the rest of it, either actively or just by stagnant development.
This is comparing apples to oranges. A better photos app isn't even remotely comparable to shipping a raster image editor. One is concerned with overall rendering of the products of a camera, the other is concerned with precise editing of a raster image.
If Pixelmator were to disappear then the value of the Mac platform would decrease. There is nothing that the Pixelmator team could do to the Photos app to make up for that.
There doesn't appear to be much overlap in terms of functionality.
Hell, if this is true I'd actively celebrate it.
When they make a focused effort in professional software, Apple can deliver.
Given how well-regarded Logic is today, it must be drastically improved. I haven't looked at it lately, but am considering the bundle with Motion and FCP.
One piece of software Apple built in-house is Motion. While it suffers from a few UI gaffes, it was an innovative product that still has no competitor in the motion-graphics space.
Even accepting this premise there's little reason to think Apple would have cared about this particular market before they bought Pixelmator. Why would you think Apple would target a given market segment?
The "ideas" in pixelmator are mostly updating traditional image-mutation patterns to match the native environment language. Let's not pretend that this was some kind of revolutionary application for image development.
Is it implemented well? Absolutely. But this is hardly an example of developing new software practices or processes.
While poaching one employee at a time might be usually legal, attempting to poach all employees of a company might not be legal, and either way is considered unethical.
Paying off the investors may be the goal.
Eliminating the product or competition ethically may be the goal.
Buying the competition’s customers, and/or distribution channels may be the goal.
Acquiring the top talent, while giving them the expected reward for having bootstrapped a company, might be the goal. Founders are often uninterested in a salaried position for themselves, but may be interested in a return for the company and payoff for everyone in it - as backpay for their investment, completely separate from their salary going forward.
Also, your hypothesis is not accurate. Buyouts are not always, or even usually, massive. It’s common for them to be small and medium sized. It is definitely not a given that making persuasive individual offers would be any cheaper than an acquisition, let alone “so much” cheaper. Depends entirely on the situation.
The government for another. Hiring all the employees of another company is regulated, and it could be seen as anti-competitive behavior.
You’re thinking of individual poaching, not whole company poaching.
2 DAN B. DOBBS, THE LAW OF TORTS §§ 448-52 (2001)("you are thus free to induce my customers, employees, or suppliers to deal with you instead of me, as long [as] they are not bound to me by contract").
Restatement (Second) of Torts § 768 (1979) (stating that interference with a competitor’s contractual relations is permissible if it does not employ wrongful means and is intended to advance the competing interest).
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Sturges, 52 S.W.3d 711, 726 (Tex. 2001) (" we conclude that to establish liability for interference with a prospective contractual or business relation the plaintiff must prove that it was harmed by the defendant's conduct that was either independently tortious or unlawful. By "independently tortious" we mean conduct that would violate some other recognized tort duty.").
You’ve asked two different questions. One about legality and the other about public perception. There are lots of things that are legal and still considered unethical. And there are lots of things that might or might not be legal, that businesses avoid simply because there’s legal risk, and/or avoid because there’s risk of negative perception.
If everyone involved in a startup agreed to be individually hired, and divest interest in the startup, and there was mutual understanding on all sides, then there may be reasonable chances of success and no lawsuits. I think that probably has happened before. If not everyone agreed to it, and a company tried to acquihire all the individuals of a company forcefully without agreement by the investors and founders, there’s a high likelihood (risk) of legal conflict, and the likelihood will increase under US law if the acquiring company would start to look anything like a monopoly on the market in question after the unofficial “merger”, right?
buyouts are often massive considering the alternative, which is the cost of recruiting and possibly inflated salaries for the people you recruit, which frankly happens often in buyouts anyway
Sure some buyouts are big. But plenty are small. Most aren’t “massive”. The histogram, I speculate, is probably something like the Zipf distribution: the frequency of buyouts of a given size is probably inversely proportional to the size, to a first approximation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Apple historically tends to look for shipping results, and the underlying software and services (such as using DarkSky's algorithms and server code as starting points) are often worth it over just putting offers out to key people.
This obviously isn't always true; they do have some longer-term research projects and strategic initiatives we've seen leak out (cars and non-invasive blood glucose monitoring are common mentioned ones), but I think Apple generally would prefer to let others succeed or fail in the research.
There's nothing _to_ Pixelmator IMHO other than the product. Apple knows how to do sepia tone filters already.
Under civil law this is regarded as tortious interference. Businesses have a contract with their employees and if you interfere with it to harm the employer then you are liable for damages.
If you tried to make a mass offer like this, the employer could likely get a judge to place an injunction against it immediately.
If they don’t notice until further down the line, watch out: damages are unlimited. They can extend to a judge breaking up your new business unit and handing it back to the original employer or rewarding damages of the entire lifetime value of the business unit.
That’s why you never see companies do this :)
Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
It is not illegal to do general hiring at good rates and shop for employees at a particular company. That wouldn't have the same results as buying a company. Plus, you wouldn't own their creations; you'd have to rebuild or clean room steal it.
And since when has a company’s reputation stopped them from doing business?
I’m not a power user, neither is my wife.. I don’t think it is all that well advertised.