“Adobe Systems can Photoshop its second-quarter results all it wants. I’m still going to be disappointed by these numbers, even if you gloss over a few of the biggest blemishes,” Anders Bylund writes for The Motley Fool.
“The maker of software for creative professionals reported a 19% year-over-year revenue gain… But for Adobe, it’s a letdown. The annual sales growth in the last three quarters was 41%, 34%, and 37%, in that order, so a mere 19% is a very weak trend,” Bylund writes.
“Color me unimpressed by Adobe. Is the company lowballing us to set itself up for a buyout by some rich rival in digital media, like Apple or Microsoft? Nah, too much conspiracy theory for my tastes,” Bylund writes. “All the same, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this corner of the market consolidate a bit — starting with Adobe.”
Full article here.
We cannot imagine that the FTC would ever approve of Microsoft buying Adobe.
MacDailyNews Note: Adobe’s market value is currently $22.8 billion. Apple’s is $151.1 billion. Apple is also debt-free and has approximately $20 billion in cash on hand currently.
MS buying Adobe? Sure. Go for it. The worst software developer buying the 2nd worst software developer. What a match.
I don’t even think that sort of thing is on MS’s radar. Their pursuit of Yahoo tells me where they’re going (or trying to go).
@ C1,
Agreed.
Personally, I would love to see Apple buy Adobe.
The reason…… it has been in the past 2 years that the software (Creative Suite) has been having more and more problems with the OSX operating platform.
“Apple” HELP out the graphic designers who have been supporting you all these years with buying your most expensive products (your towers).
Most designers I know run the creative suite on a Mac.
The problems that I have had, “have always” resulted in a finger pointing game between Apple and Adobe.
End the conflict!!!!!!! Buy out Adobe
Photoshop is dead Carbon Code, and it will be less work for Apple to develop a new programm of their own before they start transcoding millions of lines of legazy code.
So better Apple spent the money for own development e.g. the next Shake !
Only a complete an utterly uneducated moron would think for one second that Apple, or Microsoft, would buy out Adobe.
Adobe increasingly has weighted baggage and is setting itself up for disruption from a number of different vectors. The first over-serving bloated turd is Photoshop. The second over-serving, bloated turd for a millennium gone by is Flash, in most of its iterations. The third bloated turd is PDF.
Apple does not want the bloat, the employees who are trained in the wrong things, nor the stinking culture.
My personal “analysis” (Wild Ass Guess) … nothing happens.
Then, in another month… someone gets out the “Copy…Paste” and viola… another “Apple buys Adobe” story is born!
Adobe is vulnerability is in what it charges for its applications. Apple should do to Adobe what it did to Avid: beef up Aperture with features to take on photoshop, and get something to go against Illustrator and InDesign combined (Omnigraffle?) and sell it at half the price of Adobe products. This will cost a lot less than buying Adobe and then having to fix their applications.
Apple can instead spend half as much on Sun and instant entry into enterprise business.
PDF may be bloated, but the underlying technology also powers Quartz, the graphics rendering system that OS X is built upon.
… then there’s bloody Quark 🙁
talking about expensive buggy rubbish
I used to be one of Adobe’s greatest defenders, but then when I really think about it objectively, the last version of Photoshop that I loved was Photoshop 3 from the early 90’s.
From that point, it started to become bloatware.
The simplicity of the early versions enhanced my productivity, and the bloating caused by “featuritis” of the later versions detracted from it.
I’d love to see Apple buy Adobe so they could fix all the crappy code that’s making CS more and more difficult to use with every release.
Has this guy ever heard of Macromedia? The market already did consolidate…
There is no worthy competitor to Ps.
Pixelmator is a year from being ready to even look at.
I earn my living from Ps, it’s paid for itself many times over.
Mindless blathering about Adobe products being ‘over-serving bloated turds’ (whatever the heck that even means) just shows ignorance.
CS3 on a C2Duo is fast and stable. I rarely see the progress bar and it’s never crashed once.
All I want is for Adobe to incorporate the best features of FreeHand into Illustrator. Or, better yet, kill Illustrator entirely and bring back FreeHand.
Aouch! Too much laundry! Or then: kill Premiere, LightRoom, Flash and handdle over the rest to what already exists… Even Air could get better!
The issue here is not so much Apple buying Adobe. It’s MICROSOFT buying Adobe!
I know exactly what the reaction would be here. And there would be good reason for it.
There is only one way to ensure that does not happen…
I hate adobe. They have one of the worst customer services. They are turning like Microsoft. I don’t buy their products anymore.
Kit-N, great post. Illustrator is crap!!!
I bought a 733 Ghz G4 Digital audio for amongst other reasons to run Photoshop 3 in OS 9 on, I also have a great scanner with no OSX drivers. Does all I need and the price was much less than PhotoShop, cost $250 with a 21″ Viewsonic screen too. Boots up faster than Intel Macs too.
Apple won’t buy Adobe. Apple has vision, Adobe has been blindfolded by the bean-counters and shortly will be blinded by the light.
Apple won’t buy adobe, it would be way too much time and effort to merge them, and microsoft would scream and cry. And spending $20 billion wouldn’t get them a return on their investment for quite a long time.
Apple should buy corel, they have decent products that nobody uses anymore. Apple could port them to OS X, and re-brand products like “corel draw” to “apple draw”, and even use aspects their office products into iWork. And they’re only worth $277 million.
Doing this would also not scare away Adobe, since these products are nowhere near what adobe has to offer, but if sold for a cheap price would appeal to the average consumer that wants a photoshop/illustrator alternative. And think of iWork having becoming more powerful by merging with word perfect and quattro pro. Apple could create a competitive office suite for both pc and mac.
It would be more economical for Apple to create their own competing products for the few areas they don’t already compete. If history is a guide, Apple would do a better job anyway.
As for Microsoft, buying Adobe would be a good strategic move in terms of being taken seriously in the creative market. However, it wouldn’t likely be a good investment. Microsoft would have to make a competitive offer of about 30 billion at least. All for a company who’s capable of making 19 million per quarter during good times? Yikes…
The problem with Adobe is that it has become a monolithic mess. Every aspect of the company expresses this, from just trying to navigate through that morass of a website, to being forced to buy massive combinations of software to get what you want. Even after you get the product you want, it’s a massive and unapproachable mess in an of itself.
Apple buying Adobe would be counterintuitive on a corporate level at best. Look at the psychology of design in most Apple products. There is a strong minimalist feel vs. the Adobe “everything but the kitchen sink in everything we do” philosophy.
Adobe more closely resembles Microsoft in attitude, implementation, and execution than Apple.
Oh, and have you called Adobe for support lately? The vast majority of expertise on the other end of the phone is dedicated to discovering how not to assist you with your problem.
macmekrazy
“I hate adobe. They have one of the worst customer services. They are turning like Microsoft. I don’t buy their products anymore.”
So apparently you don’t work in the graphic design and/or printing field.