Cringely: Apple to buy Adobe in bid to dominate digital content creation? | Hacker News Reader

Cringely: Apple to buy Adobe in bid to dominate digital content creation?

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18 pointsnaish8 comments

Has Apple done any acquisitions of this scale before? FileMaker comes to mind.

Adobe and Apple both have very strong brands. I would be a huge destruction of value to kill Adobe's brands in favor of a unified Apple marque (Apple Photoshop, anyone?).

There is significant overlap on the creative side of things, but Adobe also has a significant enterprise software business, as well, with Acrobat Forms/Breeze/etc. There's also the Macromedia properties, and also Scene7, which is a completely different kettle of fish.

I could see them buying some core properties and auctioning off the rest.

I know little about this, but my impression since the iMac has been that Apple was going after the smug, family, friendly, part-of-your-life image. Now they're more of a (all-encompassing) media company, which isn't so far off from the digital hub. I'm not sure how Adobe fits in.

If you really see a sale viable, even partially by auction, who would participate? Google (for Flash?)? Microsoft?

"FileMaker comes to mind."

I'm not sure that's much of an example of a large-scale acquisition. When Claris (a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple) bought the company that made FileMaker, it was hardly anything like the scale of Adobe today. Since then, FileMaker has been spun off into its own wholly-owned subsidiary of Apple (I think it's technically just Claris renamed), when other parts of Claris were folded back into Apple after the NeXT merger.

Maybe you were referring to NeXT as a large-scale acquisition?

Yeah, that was kinda misplaced-- I was actually thinking of an example of a Apple acquisition continuing to use its own brands.

I really hope not.

I don't really like Adobe as a company, but whenever Apple buys a professional tool house, they kill it but awful. Witness the demise of Shake and Silicon Grail, both top notch compositing packages for Irix, Windows and Linux. Jobs bought them both, jammed them into a forced marriage and told them that their stuff could only run on Apples. People in the effects industry stayed away in droves (because of the Mac as dongle thing), which finally led to Apple fire-saling the Shake source code and killing the product. _That_ sure worked out well.

Now the only professional compositing option for Windows and Linux is Eyeon Fusion. Not a bad program, but the only one left standing thanks to Apple's actions. I suppose that if Apple buys Adobe, makes everything but Flash players Mac only, then Corel can finally make a comeback...? ;-)

there is a huge gap right now (read market opportunity) in desktop compositing software. The options that remain are either very expensive or not very functional.

This is more far-fetched than the Apple-Google merger that's been oh so rumored lately. :/

Maybe not an acquisition... Can you say that something else could be "in the air" (http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/macworld-theres.html?c...)?

Perhaps, an iPhone SDK based on Adobe AIR?

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