“Folks a lot smarter than I have wondered over the years about potential Apple mergers and acquisitions driven by Steve’s bloodlust. Apple-Disney, Apple-Google, Apple-TiVo, even Apple-Sun come to mind, but the only one that makes any sense to me at all is Apple-Adobe,” Cringely writes.
“If such an acquisition were to take place it would have to be in 2008 while Avid and Microsoft still present credible competition to keep the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission from opposing such a merger. It would go easier, too, on W’s watch. I knew he was good for something,” Cringely writes.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We’ve long hoped that Apple would buy Adobe and, since we love the ruthless Steve, begin phasing out Windows versions of applications a la Shake. At the very least, Mac users would get much more timely updates from Apple than from Adobe. That interminable wait for a Universal Photoshop really soured us on Adobe.
An Apple purchase of Adobe would be ok. I was thrilled when Apple bought eMagic though I would have liked Apple to keep producing and put some R&D;into the eMagic hardware produces for Audio Capture. The Other purchase that would make for a good fix with Apple would be Mark of the Unicorn. MOTU has some really great Audio and HD Video Capture/Processors products that would make a good fix for Logic (formally eMagic Logic) and Final Cut.
If Apple were to buy Adobe, we can be thankful that Steve Jobs is much smarter than MDN.
Pulling the plug on Windows versions of the various Adobe products would be buying a car and than ripping the quarter panels off: “Hey, lets gut the value of the company after paying $x billions of dollars to acquire it.”
I for one would be so pissed that I would simply seek an alternative to Adobe products rather than be blackmailed into buying a Mac. There’s always an alternative.
Jay-Z said: Adobe’s market cap is currently $22bn, roughly $7bn under Apple’s current rumored stash. I really doubt this happening any time soon.
In a situation like this, it would be primarily a stock deal anyway without Apple needing to expend their cash to acquire Adobe. Stock for stock transactions are tax free and presumably the acquired asset(s) would balance the stock dilution so that Apple’s stock would maintain its pre-acquisition level or even rise due to perceived synergy. So don’t let the amount of cash that Apple has lead you to think it’s unlikely.
Cringley makes me cringe. When was the last time he was right on anything Apple? C’mon Robert, have you never heard of the word “monopoly”? The merger would surely be blocked for the reason that Apple would control large parts of the design market.
i doubt it, but if nothing else you have to give him credit for finding a situation in which W would be useful.
heck of a job bushie.
nevertheless, at $22-25 bln., it doesn’t make much sense.
It would take forever for Apple to see a return on their investment. With net income of around 750 million, it would take around 15-20 years to get their money back. Even if their profit rose to $2 bln./yr it would still take 10 years and it’ll take a little while before Adobe sees that kind of profit.
Interesting as all the acquisition rumors are. I was at CES for a short time because I wanted to see one thing and that was SyncTV. One of the odd things I noticed at the SyncTV booth was a set top box that they had hidden because they could not disclose who they were partnering with just yet. The odd thing was that the remote the rep. was trying to keep hidden was an Apple remote (I know them well) and the little of the interface that I saw looked a lot like the Apple TV interface.
My Question is could Apple be bring SyncTV’s content HD and all directly to the Apple TV like they did with YouTube?
An exclusive SyncTV partnership to make the Apple TV the SyncTV set top box would make much more sense then Apple acquiring Adobe.
Apple should create apps that out Adobe out of business. I hate Adobe. Their FrameMaker software that I’m forced to use is over priced crap,
Whether the acquisition would be worthwhile probably depends on what Apple has in mind. Revisit this after the keynote 2009. Owning Flash and PDF might be more profitable than we can see from here.
An universal Shockwave plugin would be nice as well.
Risky to buy Adobe and shit out the Windows version, at least right away. Phase it out and it will help Apple gain inroads in some areas of enterprise.
@Jeremy
“Sony is a much, much bigger company”
Huh?
Sony Market Cap 55.4B
Aapl Market Cap 151B
I just finished installing and updating Adobe CS3 and I must say: At first glance, it looks a little rough around the edges. For starters, even after installing all available updaters I’m getting weird messages in Acrobat, Bridge and Photoshop about missing or outdated components. Not exactly what one would expect from a package that costs $1799! Adobe could and should do better. It’s hard for me to imagine that Apple would actually buy Adobe, but it certainly would be great if they ever did.
error correction for above post, @Tyler
FAIL
From a business standpoint (that means making a profit), dumping Adobe’s windows versions is about as stupid as it would be for Microsoft to stop making the mac version of Office out of spite.
To critic:
Yeah, killing the Windows apps would be childish. So, how about just releasing the Windows versions a year or two behind the OS X versions and leaving some of the features out?
Sound familiar?
Apple would be buying a shitload of legacy code that they will have to re-engineer. It will be a huge hassle, and Apple would probably have to fire all the retarded engineers Adobe is currently strapped with, especially the project managers. It won’t be easy or pretty. They would be better off just starting over for most of it.
An Apple-Adobe merger would break my heart into a million little pieces.
=(
Gonna have to spend some of the billions on something. Excellent fit. Maybe why Elements 6 came out so suddenly.
Would wrap up Design/Graphics leaving more development for Consumer and Enterprise development.
@ Hmmm
“Maybe why Elements 6 came out so suddenly.”
Er, no.
No, no, no!
I think it’s a bit expensive for what you get. Although it could really add muscle to their Application suites (iLife for one).
I’d love Apple to buy Adobe. And then maybe it won’t be continually trying to phone home. My company has a firewall and prevents my software from trying to do this. So, no updates for me and constantly being bugged for not contacting directly to Adobe.
I know they do this so nobody will steal their product, but why don’t they make it easier for you to contact them? Sheesh! If Apple bought Adobe, then your software would still try to phone home but it would do it correctly where you could actually get it to connect (sort of like the crash reports always seem to make it out to Apple).
Here’s another angle. What about the new “Core” technologies that were offered in Tiger and expanded in Leopard that Adobe cannot offer because if they did their Mac products would be far superior to their Windows versions.
I’ve got to believe that by now Steve is growing very impatient waiting to see a major player in the software market utilizes these technologies. If they were to buy Adobe they would no longer have to keep the playing field level. They could offer superior Mac products and the inferior windows products would eventually fade away on their own. If Apple owned Adobe they would not lose money because the folks who use these products would simply change platforms.
Could there be a more effective way to promote the superiority of OS-X than to show it off by a disparity in Adobe’s product line?