
Why Steve Jobs can't stand Adobe - anderzole
http://www.hardmac.com/news/2010/02/05/apple-and-adobe-the-roots-and-reasons-behind-today-s-situation
======
rodyancy
I would love Apple to create a Photoshop competitor. As powerful as Photoshop
is, there is a ton of room for simplification. You know there is a problem
when software provides five different ways to perform a task, yet users have
to have 5 years experience, or Google, to remember how to implement it.

~~~
ilovecomputers
You don't need Apple to implement this, there is already a software product
for the Mac that is slowly evolving into a full-featured photo editor:
<http://www.pixelmator.com/>

~~~
luckyland
A closed source product built upon exploited open source code.

Can Pixelmator to do unto others?

~~~
luckyland
If you're inclined to downvote this sentiment, at least have the testicles to
comment why.

~~~
potatolicious
1 - You are being inflammatory and immature. You are welcome to raise your own
opinions without questioning the testicular fortitude of everyone on this
site.

2 - Pixelmator is reliant on ImageMagick, which is governed by the ImageMagick
license. This license in no way prohibits commercial use of the library, and
requires only attribution. By all accounts Pixelmator has respected this
license.

3 - Not only has Pixelmator respected the letter of the license agreement, but
it even widely advertises its use of open source components. How this is a bad
thing for open source in general, only you seem to know.

4 - To pre-empt any Stallman-esque tirades about the evils of commercial
exploitation of open source software... remember that no developers are in any
way forced to allow others to commercial exploit their open source work.
ImageMagick has done this out of their own accord, and it would be
presumptuous to assume that people _following their license_ are exploiting
them in a way they did not intend. Furthermore, from what I can tell
Pixelmator has added _extremely_ substantial functionality to ImageMagick (a
top-end GUI app instead of a command-line app, really?), and is deserving of
whatever commercial success they may derive from this work.

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pavs
How about the fact that Flash (besides having performance issues) would more
or less end the reason of having an app store and apple's one large source of
revenue?

Do you think if iphone had flash, developers would go through the trouble of
app betting process by apple? Every streaming music service, video service and
flash games and applications would make Appstore irrelevant.

That, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason why we will _never_ see
flash support in iphone of ipad no matter how fast and secure flash becomes in
the near future.

Not that I care about flash in mobile device. But, using performance as the
main reason for not supporting flash is silly. It can be one of the several
reasons, but definitely not the main reason.

~~~
philwelch
Apple's three large sources of revenue are selling Macs, selling iPods, and
selling iPhones. Everything else--from music to TV shows to movies to iPhone
apps--is a complementary product rather than a major revenue driver for Apple.

~~~
grinich
"iTunes and App Store are still running a bit over break-even." — Peter
Oppenheimer (Apple CFO)

(via <http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/25/apple-q1-2010-results/> )

~~~
evgen
For a company whose main product lines throw off massive amounts of cash "a
bit over break-even" is SEC-speak for "loss leader." If they ran for too long
as money-losers then Apple would be more vulnerable to predatory pricing
attacks based on the closed nature of both products, as long as they barely
make money then Apple has better protection.

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GeneralMaximus
Flash is doomed. I'm more interested in what would happen if Apple _did_ write
a Photoshop competitor.

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hga
Hmmm, another detailed and specific list of Apple's discontents with Adobe
which pretty much doesn't intersect with this on submitted yesterday:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1102512>

~~~
radley
First sentence:

 _For some absolutely shocking reason some people wonder why the Apple iPad
comes without Java and Flash support._

Fair to say it's basically a biased rant.

~~~
hga
Yeah, definitely a rant (there's nothing to be happy about in this situation,
unless you think Flash is evil per se (e.g. its not well known cookie
system)), but it seems to be backed up with hard facts.

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Tichy
Still, for the longest time the main target demography of Mac users were
designers who were primarily using Photoshop. Maybe Apple should present their
Photoshop replacement asap.

~~~
jwhite
Or perhaps the relationship is more complex than that. Despite his antics,
Steve Ballmer was right about developers. Apple might be irritated by Adobe
over some issues, but I don't think they would want to cut Photoshop's lunch
like that.

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tszming
looks like MSFT would benefit from conflicts between apple/adobe, apple/google
etc.

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cookiecaper
Once again, every single issue listed in this article would disappear if Adobe
freed Flash. I don't know how they can't see the necessity of this. They
should do it soon, before serious HTML5 adoption gets underway, if they want
Flash to last.

~~~
dreyfiz
Supposedly, the swf specification is already available to anyone who wants to
implement it, without restriction:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alter...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash#Open_standard_alternatives)

~~~
dreyfiz
Wil Shipley (the Delicious Monster guy, formerly of the Omni Group) tweeted
that they wrote their own Flash player for Rhapsody, and it wasn't hard:

<http://twitter.com/wilshipley/status/8404153085>

~~~
freetard
I doubt it was full featured, given how huge is the spec and how many
technologies it embeds especially nowadays (video streaming, p2p etc).

~~~
hga
And doesn't the video streaming include payments to e.g. the H.264 rights
holders? Freeing the whole thing still wouldn't give others the right to
distribute it with those codecs.

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guelo
The part about Adobe being slow to fix bugs had me laughing, I've seen apple
take years to fix obvious annoying bugs that had developers banging their
heads against their desks.

Apple is so annoying to work with with their insane secrecy and arrogance, if
I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX and talk Microsoft into pulling their
Windows licenses for Parallels.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_if I was Adobe I'd pull Photoshop for OSX_

This is, perhaps, one of the reasons why you're not Adobe.

~~~
statictype
It's not a completely outrageous point. There is a not-insignificant group of
Apple customers who are using their Macs for design purposes with Photoshop
being their primary tool.

If Photoshop ceased to be available on the Mac (or performed below standard)
then which is more likely?

They find some other tool? Or switch to an Operating System which lets them
run their tool of choice?

For casual photo editing, you would probably try a different tool. For
professionals who live in Photoshop, they'll probably just switch to Windows.

~~~
wvenable
If Photoshop ceased to exist for the Mac, that's a huge opportunity for a 3rd
party developer or Apple themselves to fill the gap. While most Mac OS users
can now simply boot into Windows, I'm sure they wouldn't all be happy about
it.

~~~
jacquesm
You buy your hardware because it runs your software, not the other way around.

