

Cringely: Apple to buy Adobe in bid to dominate digital content creation? - naish
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080111_003899.html

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joshwa
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.

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jacobolus
_"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?

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

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oofoe
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...? ;-)

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far33d
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.

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

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byteCoder
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...](http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/01/macworld-
theres.html?cid=96829346#comment-96829346))?

Perhaps, an iPhone SDK based on Adobe AIR?

