Microsoft Buying Adobe?(uk.reuters.com) |
Microsoft Buying Adobe?(uk.reuters.com) |
Adobe has long lost any luster it might have had, and has descended into outsourced maintenance-ware. An acquisition like this would be about as smart as Intel acquiring Mc(rap)fee...
EDIT: aCquisition.
A lawsuit is like having to beat up somebody to make an example out of him. It only happens when people refuse to pay for protection.
Slightly offtopic but since people are dicussing updates. Updates are an important part of the sotfware lifecycle. It's no big deal that sometimes the updater might need to be updated.
I personally get a bit angry when of all people, software engineers get annoyed about updates. You should know better that the update to software would push better algorithms, reducing CPU and memory usage while it might also have security fixes making software more secure.
Nobody (not even Apple) makes perfect software. There is no such thing as bug free code. Updates fix bugs.
I understand it is a bit psychological too, since people complain more about free updates than paid ones.
Engineers should promote updates amongst friends and family and not deride updates in public.
Then to patch people's computers, they relied on notifications given when visiting websites like ... http://community.adobe.com/help/
It required users to manually download and install a patch :)
I, for one, welcome this development. It brings some hopes for better performing Flash, which I hate with a passion but its a fact of life. Flash is in need of some engineering muscle. There are many things Microsoft can possibly do to it and most of them are good, see: kill it -> good, open source it -> good, merge with silverlight -> good.
Same thing with other Adobe products: they used to be best in class some time ago, but I'm convinced that company cannot code anymore, but Microsoft still can.
No way this is bad news. The worse that can happen is nothing changes.
Edit: also, lets stop this nonsense with applying "still somewhat profitable" and "dying" to these companies. Both are doing great financially. Adobe's profits from CS keep breaking records - look at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/2010...
"I, for one, welcome..."
Uh, yeah... I agree it makes perfect sense for both of them. For anyone who isn't Microsoft or Adobe, the prospect seems less appealing. Two companies with considerable monopolistic sway in their respective markets come together to improve their profit margins?
Merging two huge globs that each can extract rent on their various properties into a single similar vast glob. What could possibly go wrong...
The combined corporate mass would exceed the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit and they would collapse into a black hole?
Microsoft has one of the most diverse revenue streams of any software company. They're going to be around for a while.
Google should actually be more afraid of disruptive technologies. Their revenue is primarily from advertising. They are truly a single revenue source company.
I really do think all product development for Linux or Android would be cancelled (Flash for Windows Phone 7 only).
If they just want Flash, I bet they're bummed they didn't buy Macromedia a few years ago.
Hardly anyone is paying for Expression Studio in the way they are for Adobe CS. The people using it are doing so because it was bundled.
What I'd love to see is Microsoft buy the Flash/PDF side of the company, and then the creative arm (CS, the type foundry, lightroom, etc) be spun off into an independent company that was once again run by people passionate about design and great software.
The Photoshop/CS part of Adobe is somewhat profitable, correct? Would MS let it go (even for a bucket of cash)?
On a side note, I always thought Autodesk was Adobe's natural predator, I was expecting a buy offer from them.
I'm not sure if this would be considered a successful spin off though as Microsoft bought them when they were, IMHO, at their peak.
I know there are a few core products that were results of acquisitions, namely PowerPoint and Visio. They've pretty much integrated deeply into Microsoft, so that's always a possibility here.
Photoshop & Flash would be covered by an MSDN subscription.
So, instead of dishing out $1000 for CS6, we need only enroll in BizSpark (or whatever Microsoft's next version of its ISV thing is called), and pay $400 for all our OS's, all our dev tools, and all our graphics stuff in one package. Now all they need to do is buy Codesmith, Red Gate and Jetbrains so that I never need to pay full price for software again.
Just saying...
Adobe is worth less than half of Facebook? Rolls eyes
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...
It's a bit like old school advertising (billboards, TV) versus Google pay-per-click ads. As soon as you can measure something accurately, it's value decreases.
Just a small detail, but the above bullet exaggerates the indicative reaction of the market. It was up 17 percent for an instant because someone fat fingered and bought it for $30.00 exactly at 3:08pm (Added: 12 minutes after the announcement at 2:56pm), maybe a little excited to buy in. Really it is up 10-11%, which is a strong and positive reaction, but there is more uncertainty factored into the price than what the bullet would seem to imply.
Can you imagine if physical systems worked like that? That observed physical phenomena would change in response to what the experimenter/observer thinks will happen?
Those two may interfere with your browsing habits but just because you don't come into contact with anything else Adobe produces doesn't mean it doesn't have some importance in the software industry.
Fun fact, the first JavaScript was written by a Netscaper in Lisp. The first ActionScript was in Standard ML, and now both guys work on ECMAScript :-) ActionScript's engine powers Mozilla's JS engine (yes, flash and firefox engines off the same code base!) and the Lisper guy works on V8. Get into the javascript scene and you will find the intellectual incest that is hacking.
As a .net dev id love to see them grow the community beyond enterprise.
Randal C. Picker, a professor of law of the University of Chicago law school, said in a telephone interview that the technology space is drastically different than it was when Microsoft was originally charged with antitrust violations and an acquisition or partnership of this nature would likely not be halted.
Mr. Picker said that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are focused on other large technology companies and consumer related issues.
[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/microsoft-and-adobe...
That wouldn't be too bad, really.
shudder
shudder
What's more possible is some sort of partnership that enables stronger PDF support in Office, improved Flash support in Windows Phone and better integration between Office and CS applications.
Microsoft's primary business is selling Windows and Office desktop licenses. Since many Adobe CS users also own Windows and Office licenses, better integration between the two suites would be beneficial for both companies. Introducing a new mobile phone OS based on Flash/Flex/Silverlight or some other combination would not be worth the acquisition cost.
Then there's the creative suite. What would happen to photoshop? Dreamweaver (or MS Frontpage 2012 as it'd be renamed)? InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher 2012 as it'd be called)?
Also think about the other side of it. The Acrobat team would be forced to actually secure their reader instead of relying on researchers to do it for them.
I think this can only be a good thing(tm). As Dan Kaminsky once said, "What could possibly go wrong?"
“The Quartz renderer and the PDF interpreter that Apple ships with Mac OS X are built with Apple code, with no external licenses, by Apple employees. Adobe just publishes a specification for how it’s supposed to function. This gives Apple considerably more flexibility with regard to what Quartz and the PDF interpreter can be used for.”
An Adobe acquisition would render this a moot point. Full .PDF support would show up in Windows very quickly, which wouldn't be a bad thing IMO.
Ballmer's not that dumb, is he? Sounds like posturing for Apple / Google.
Indeed, acquisition is a real and fascinating possibility, but surely there are many other ways they could work together to fight Apple, if that is what they want to do.
[1] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/microsoft-and-adobe...
All that said, one important web asset MSFT doesnt have a strong play in is web analytics.
That said, considering that MSFT just f*ed up the Office GUI (ribbon, etc) I probably shouldn't hold my breath.
Seriously, what's wrong with menus and windows?
Also there was a ton of tension between these companies early in the decade when Adobe was dragging its feet to do Photoshop for OSX.
Microsoft could use some help in the mobile market, though, so I can believe the idea of those two companies joining forces to make some headway there.
Killing JRun and Cold Fusion would be doing them a favor.
Although they have become rather bloated and the last few versions have failed to innovate in significant ways, there is a lot of graphics professionals who would be very reluctant to waste all that hard-won muscle-memory.
Plus there's a lot of work-flow knowledge in them there apps.
Sort of like the maxim "Half my advertising works, I just don't know which half." Well, Google let you measure which half, and improve on the other.
On the other hand, it would be a natural fit for someone like Autodesk given their resources and markets. Retail box graphics applications could make sense in Microsoft's product line. Even Corel would be in a position to capitalize on Adobe leaving the Windows market.
Which runs which down? For my requirements, Keynote > PowerPoint, Excel > Numbers, Pages ~= Word.
So, while killing CS for Mac might work (users switching platforms might outnumber users switching programs), killing Office for Mac would just force universities to switch to ODF and in the long term, it would hurt the rest of Office's markets.
killing Office for Mac
Sorry, but CS is niche software used by certain professionals. MS Office / Exchange are used by everybody else ;)
And I wouldn't bet against Microsoft for providing an alternative to CS: judging from the experience of using Microsoft Blend, they are rookies, but they can manage it.
Fundamentalists may differ.
That is clearly not true for physical systems.
Consider a 2-state single particle system, the outcome probabilities of one state vs. the other are fixed by the Hamiltonian and the time evolution of the system, and not by the experimenter's opinion of the system.
I personally got royally screwed over Nothing Real purchase (we had a site license of both linux and windows version).
Chalice, Shake (and Tremor), Final Cut, Logic, India Pro... - all acquisitions followed by "Mac only from now on, sorry".
When I wrote a an XSI plugin for a feature film production, in 2005, for XSI running on Linux, half of the API was still using COM, it the app required a special gcc version that shipped with the sdk to compile plugins with and the Python was ActiveState Python (which clashed with the Linux system's Python). In short, it was a disaster from a developers, and still a lot of trouble from a user's pov.
Now Adobe doesn't support Linux much but if what MS did to XSI is anything to go by, I wouldn't want to be a developer on one of those apps, after the acquisition.
Autodesk and Adobe compete really only in digital audio & video editing, and compositing. The rest of Adobe doesn't really have much impact on any of Autodesk's businesses.
I suspect that Autodesk bought Alias for Alias:Studio rather than for Maya, because Alias:Studio is the Big Dog revenue stream there, and among Autocad's biggest competitors.
It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.
They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.
The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.
Edit: The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.
Has it actually been determined that Microsoft makes any profit at all from any of those products? Entertainment division (where XBox and Live and Zune lives) is about 12% of their revenue and is still not profitable, while search and online (which is Bing and MSN) loses $700 Million every quarter or thereabouts (at least it did last fiscal quarter).
Their bread and butter has always been Windows and Office. That other stuff are loss leaders, in a way.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsoft-op...
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-in-case-you-...
Still, even if you ONLY look at Apple's software revenues, I suspect that Apple would turn out to be more diversified than Google. :)
Presumably it would be the same benefit that caused them to make Silverlight available to multiple platforms and browsers.
At least with CF and (IIRC) JRun you are not locked into Windows...
Frankly even considering the vendor lock-in implicit in being wed to the MS stack, I'd take that option over CF any day of the week. That said I see no reason to choose between different degrees of poison when there's plenty of good clean water around.