Giant Face Off: Apple vs. Adobe. Good Or Bad?

Is Adobe every Mac users fair weather friend? Is the Photoshop maker with Mac roots friend or foe?

Or, has the graphics and media giant awakened to smell the coffee and realized that both Apple and the Mac are back? Apple and Adobe head to head. Who wins?

New Age Journalism™ means I can accuse without retribution simply by asking questions.

For example, I could accuse Adobe of being a fair weather friend to Apple, the Mac, and Mac users, because they treat all of us as second class computer citizens, right?

Where’s the native version of Photoshop for Intel Macs? Or, whatever happened to Adobe Premiere? Or, why isn’t there Photoshop Elements 5 for Mac (there’s one for Windows)?

Adobe probably has a love-hate relationship with Apple and the Mac. Yes, Adobe’s roots go back a long way, but can be traced directly to Apple and Xerox. Apple once owned a huge chunk of Adobe.

As the Mac’s market share shriveled in the mid and late 90s, Adobe, according to many, began treating Mac customers as second class citizens. Windows was where the money was and so went Adobe.

Apple, far more the visionary than Microsoft or Adobe, looked down the road and decided to take action to protect itself from either giant pulling the plug.

The end result of Apple’s action was Mac OS X on Intel, Intel chips in Macs, iTunes on Windows, Final Cut Pro vs. Adobe Premiere, and Pages and Keynote vs. Microsoft Office.

Apple’s Steve Jobs knew that Mac users buy software to run on Macs, and if Adobe and/or Microsoft pulled the development plug on the Mac to focus solely on Windows, the Mac could be finished.

Fanning the burning embers begets a flame. Adobe pulled the plug on the video application Premiere not long after Apple launched Final Cut Pro (vastly superior product, originally purchased from Macromedia, now a part of Adobe).

Since then, Adobe has yet to prove loyalty to a huge and profitable base of Mac customers.

Why? The Mac’s low market share, and Adobe’s need to go where the money is.

Today, the money is going to Apple and the Mac. Guess what?

Fair weather friend Adobe is back in the hunt with a little competition for Apple and some great new products for—ready for this? Mac users.

Apple has iLife—iTunes, iMovie, Garageband, iDVD, and iWeb—running on every new Mac. There’s also Final Cut Studio, the award winning audio, video, and media production powerhouse.

What does Adobe have? Turf to protect or new soil and new crops? Or, both? I vote the latter. Adobe just announced the next version of Adobe Production Studio and you’ll be amazed at what it will do.

It’s competition for Apple and new applications for the Mac and Mac users.

Production Studio will ship later in 2007 and contain Adobe Premiere Pro (for video production), Adobe Encore DVD (to compete with iDVD, and DVD Studio from Apple), and Adobe Soundbooth (something akin to Apple’s SoundTrack).

Add that to Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and other tools and, if it’s not a winner, it’s certainly better than the alternative. What do Mac users get when two giants collide? More choices, better applications, and, importantly, a future of more of the same.

For now, competition is good, but kudos to Apple for going head to head with Adobe and providing a good reason for the graphic giant to stick to the Mac instead of sticking it to Mac users.

So, that head butting worked to Apple’s favor. What could Apple do to get Microsoft to produce more and better applications for the Mac?

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