Adobe Axes Premiere For Mac, Announces New Windows-Only Product

by , 10:00 AM EDT, July 8th, 2003

Adobe Systems announced yesterday that the new version of Adobe Premiere, it's video-editing tool, will be available for Windows only. In addition, Adobe announced a new audio-editing tool that will also be exclusively for Windows. These announcements come mere weeks after the release of an update to Apple's digital video and audio-editing suite, Final Cut Pro 4.

While Premiere has long been a staple product on the Mac, the aggressive entry of FCP into the market has gradually seen Premiere's sales on the Mac dwindle. Adobe went so far earlier this year as to post an article on its Web site saying that the PC was preferred for its software, based in part on the performance of Premier, which runs faster on Windows than the Mac.

Central to Adobe's comments on dropping Mac support for Premiere was the fact that Apple is competing in this space with its own line of products, that of Final Cut Pro and Final cut Express. Adobe is sounding a theme that many other developers have voiced, which is that competition from Apple makes it difficult for third-party developers to make a living on the Mac. From a CNET News.com article.

"We were rewriting Premiere from scratch, and it would have taken a lot of work to have cross-platform support," Trescot said.

The Mac already has several competing video-editing applications, including Apple's Final Cut family of products, making for a small and crowded market, he said.

"If Apple's already doing an application, it makes the market for a third-party developer that much smaller," Trescot said. "I think you're going to find that more and more--if Apple's in a software market, third-party vendors are going to skip it."

Despite the abandonment of the Mac version of Premiere, both Adobe and Apple continue to say that the two companies have a good business relationship, as they have done whenever it seemed as if there were problems between them. Some analysts, however, believe there may be rough waters ahead if Apple continues it's trend of making more and more software in-house. From the article:

Roger Kay, an analyst for research firm IDC, said Apple faces a tricky balancing act as it expands its role as a software developer. Apple-created applications tend to provide a more consistent user experience that may attract new converts, he said. "Apple, by controlling its own stack from top to bottom, can provide a more integrated experience," Kay said. "They're less dependent on other companies to produce their user experience."

More information and analysis can be found in the full article at C|Net's Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

While we are sad to see a major Adobe product like Premiere go, the move has actually been coming for some time. Back when Final Cut Pro was originally released, it was widely heralded as the perfect alternative to Premiere. After recently hitting version 4.0, FCP has become a whole lot more than a stand-alone video editing tool. It now sports premium features such as incorporated type effects, soundtrack scoring, and much more. Adobe is still playing catch-up to FCP's feature set with their non-linear editing solution, so it is no surprise that they are choosing to not compete in the smaller Macintosh market.

It should also be noted that Adobe's comments about competition from Apple are at least partly PR-speak. Adobe is abandoning Mac support, and wants to shift the blame to Apple for when its Mac customers get tense. That said, Adobe has a good point: When Apple is competing in a market, it makes it hard for any third party to compete. When the market is as small as Apple's, there's only so much of the pie to go around.

So, should Apple worry about the health of its third party and partner developers, or make sure that the platform has the tools that it needs to be competitive in the markets Apple deems important? That's a no-brainer, but there are bound to be casualties in the process, and those casualties bring collateral damage in the form of other discontented developers. It's a tough line to walk for Apple.

That said, Adobe was just plain beaten on the film editing side of things by FCP. Had Premiere been a better Mac app, who knows if Apple would have ever pursued FCP in the first place.

CNET News.com Article