Cringely: Why Apple will buy Adobe

“Steve Jobs has his Macworld keynote address coming and will no doubt deliver to us a few of the products we’ve all been predicting, presented with a level of showmanship simply not seen elsewhere in the industry. But my job this week is to look beyond products, to take a step back and give a long view of where Apple is headed. And the centerpiece of this analysis is my conclusion that Apple will inevitably buy Adobe Systems,” Robert X. Cringely writes for PBS.

“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.