I'm tired of reading random conjecture by Mr. Cringely, why are they featured here? Why not follow the commentary of Rob Enderele as well?

There really should be some accountability to all the baseless things he writes about. (eg. Apple TV = secret torrent server?) I'm pretty sure he's more wrong than right, but even worsee I can't recall when he actually was right...

Sincreley,
Tired-of-Cringely

And I can't believe anyone would compare him to Enderle. Sure, Cringely is wrong often to irritate the glass-half-empty folks, but so what? His stuff is interesting, and he's not a shill.

As for selling the Pro apps and buying adobe to get Flash and Air--seems a bit of a stretch to say the least. But interesting.

Apple shopping the pro apps... Are they really doing that?

If so, my guess is that they'd part with them because they don't want to invest the top level oversight and resources neccessary. To Jobs, these apps are great, but he's hunting BIG game and these aren't big enough.

The big game? He's after huge numbers of consumers and the enterprise. How will he bag them? The iPhone(s) and the follow-ons: In-your-pocket/mini-tablet internet, computing, personal media creation and consumption, personal video phone srevices, movies, and the rest of the industry they already own. These targets are big and not easy to win. They need inspired hw/sw design, business relationships, and marketing brilliance.

When you're looking to make a goddman big dent in the universe, the professional apps are just too damn distracting!

...simply due to Adobe's crappy track record on the Mac these last few decades - most significantly demonstrated by the truly horrific Adobe Reader 8 (garbage!), with which I'm forced to deal deal (thanks, Windows users: crap solutions are "good enough", eh?)

What I don't see is the monopoly/anti-trust "issue" regarding an Adobe purchase w/ existing in-house apps. If Adobe wasn't smacked for eating Macromedia/Flash/DreamWeaver, I just can't imagine the grounds for legal action over Apple acquiring a co that has so little overlap w/ their in-house stuff.

But then, it *IS* Cringely...he's no better than Thurrot, Enderle, et al, but I don't resent him getting web-hits nearly as much as I do the others - he may be dumb, but he's not crooked...as far as I know).

Mostly to see Apple serve up a steaming hot cup of Cocoa CS4 that plays great with Leopard. The current Creative Suite programs for the Mac must have code that is more like a can of generic spaghetti with meat sauce.

Like they did with Filemaker, spin it off.
Apple should buy Adobe, spin off the media production apps, offer iLife like apps for the windows crowd.
Then, in say 2012, stop or limit the function of those apps forcing then to the FINAL SWITCH!

Acquiring Adobe might make interesting press, and sure, Apple could afford it now. But this is just not Apple's style. What have they been doing for years? Acquiring tiny companies who make interesting, often expensive products with lots of potential upside. Apple then uses the technology in new or existing products (like Coverflow) or tweaks and repackages the product for a far wider audience at a far lower price (Motion, Logic, Final Cut Pro). Hell, the gave away iTunes and look how that turned out. Bottom line...a smallish check on the front end leads to large gains on the backend.

Buying Adobe would mean a *HUGE* check on the front end, both in cash and stock. It means swallowing a company with thousands of employees, and lots of existing facilities. So if I'm Steve Jobs looking at this deal, what's the upside for paying billions? Let's break it down.

1. Flash. Nice tech but it's full saturated in the marketplace. Not much growth here...just protecting your backside from Microsoft's Silverlight. Right now, this is the only way you're going to see Flash on the iPhone. Unclear what happens to all Flash efforts on non-iPhones since Flash pretty much sucks on all phones right now.

2. Photoshop. Maybe some upside here if you lowered the price to get more legal copies out there. Otherwise all the Pros who use this daily already have a legal copy. Lowering the price might convince some to upgrade that wouldn't otherwise. And we might get a Cocoa 64-bit app before 2015.

3. Photoshop Elements & Lightroom. Killed for Apeture with the best bits merged into that product...I agree with the writer.

3. After Effects. Lots of upside here, both in more sales and tying the technology into Apeture and Final Cut.

4. Adobe AIR and Adobe Media Player. Killed immediately.

5. Dreamweaver/Coldfusion/Flex. They would be nice to have since you would basically control all serious content creation on the web. Some upside here if handled properly. Merged and perhaps renamed...definitely with a cheaper price. And a Mac version would certainly happen. Windows version would continue.

6. Acrobat And PDF. The Windows version would get a better UI. The Mac version would cease to exist eventually with all features getting migrated to the Leopard OS natively.

7. Shockwave/Director 11. Does anyone still develop in this? Killed.

8. Illustrator and Indesign. Kept for the Pros that use them everyday. Maybe some lower prices to spur sales. Pagemaker finally bites the dust.

9. Postscript and Font licensing. That's sooo 80's.

10. Framemaker. Hey, maybe we might see a Mac version for the first time since 1990. Or it could be sold off or killed (yes I know, there are those in the publishing business who live and die by this product).

11. All server products get converted to Leopard Server. Some may get killed. Most Windows versions survive for the time being.

Unlike the writer, I don't agree that you'd necessarily need to ditch the Apple Pro apps. All of those apps were acquired by Apple's current acquisition strategy which has served them very well. Getting rid of the Pro apps means your hose your own strategy and wind up pissing off a lot of people. Instead, I'd find a buyer for Premiere, sure. But Final Cut Pro's real competition is Avid and Media 100...and they aren't going anywhere. Logic, Motion and Shake don't have counterparts at Adobe.

Wasn't Cringley harping about Apple buying Adobe over a month ago? At any rate, I think his argument makes sense, for the direction Apple's business is headed. Obviously, Flash is a very attractive acquisition - though, the theory that Apple is trying to unload its popular pro apps makes little sense to me.

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Sir Harry Flashman wrote:
Mostly to see Apple serve up a steaming hot cup of Cocoa CS4 that plays great with Leopard.

Yeah, I know their pro market is marginal compared to consumer sales these days, but it would definitely be to Apple's advantage to have priority placed first and foremost on their platform. Heck, CS 3 still doesn't play nice with Spaces (at least Illustrator). That way, Apple could say, "No, you ARE going to release a 64 bit Photoshop for the next version."

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xmattingly wrote:
Yeah, I know their pro market is marginal compared to consumer sales these days, but it would definitely be to Apple's advantage to have priority placed first and foremost on their platform. Heck, CS 3 still doesn't play nice with Spaces (at least Illustrator). That way, Apple could say, ";No, you ARE going to release a 64 bit Photoshop for the next version";

I use Creative Suite (CS2) a lot, well a little less these days now that inDesign crashes frequently in Leopard and Distiller doesn't even work. CS2 Illustrator, PhotoShop, Acrobat Pro, and GoLive (may God have mercy on its soul) work fine.

Anyway, last week I delivered another job to the printer that I laid out using Pages. I had to distill the .ps file using CS2 Distiller from my iBook (running Tiger), a minor inconvenience. I could have exported the Pages file to PDF/x-1a, but they still are a larger file than one that was distilled.

Well where I am leading is how hard would it be for Apple to develop some CS type of pro apps. Pages has a good start, but I need a vector art and photo editing programs with layers and blending. Also a web authoring and management program that has a Mac like interface, DreamWeaver seems to be a giant step backwards.

Sidebar: I just watched my wife on TV. Turner Classic movies just ran a short documentary on the movie Soylent Green. My wife was an extra in the movie and I saw her in some scenes that had been cut. I need to get a DVD copy of that movie.

"resistance to Blu-ray is an effort to slow the technology"

Apple's market share in the PC world is small as it is. But it's even smaller in the consumer electronics world. To think that Apple's "reluctance" would have anything but a trivial effect on the adoption of Blu-Ray is just silly.

In any event, Apple has already strongly denied the rumors of shopping around their pro apps.

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/05/05/apple-denies-rumors-of-selling-off-pro-apps/

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xmattingly wrote:
That way, Apple could say, "No, you ARE going to release a 64 bit Photoshop for the next version."

Adobe's been working on that since June of 2007.

That's a lot of cash to buy someone just to tell them "carry on."

It's been said the rumor was put about by competitors. That would be to prevent users committing to Apple Pro Apps. And that would be because vendors have got wind of what's coming, and it will make competing even harder. And that could be that the ground-up rewrite Shake replacement code base will build more applications than just another Shake. I'm thinking of 2 targets: Photoshop (single frame compositing) and Flash (web deployment of video). But I'm far from knowledgeable on these topics.

There's really no point to unloading Apple's ProApps in an Adobe acquisition. They can simply unload the overlapping Adobe apps.
Sell Premiere keep FinalCutPro, sell SoundBooth keep SoundTrack Pro and Logic, sell Acrobat and incorporate some more of its stuff into Preview, but retain control of the PDF standard, keep Illustrator and Photoshop and finally make the Mac OS X compliant, get rid of AfterEffects and finish the Mac OS X transition of Shake, get rid of Lightroom, but keep Aperture. With that, there's near zero overlap left, Apple has some token competitors that can continue these cross-platform products, and then nuke Windows support for all the retained products, just as they did with Logic.