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Microsoft Buying Adobe?

uk.reuters.com

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Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#211

Post by rbanffy »

etherael wrote: post #198
rbanffy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... On the other hand, killing CF and JRun to doom them to IIS and .NET is not exactly helpful...

Helpful to whom? of all the devs I've ever met that have used CF, the most positive thing I've ever heard said about it is that "they're used to its failings and it's comfortable". I can't help but think Microsoft's tools are a much more appealing value proposition than Adobe's in this particular space.

Microsoft's tools may be more appealing than Cold Fusion or JRun, but they are still less appealing than pretty much everything else this side of Java.

At least with CF and (IIRC) JRun you are not locked into Windows...

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#212

Post by _b8r0 »

protomyth wrote: post #111
dsspence wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't license PDF from Adobe even though it is part of OS X's native graphics renderer. “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…

Steve Jobs learned from his experience with Adobe and the licensed version of Display Postscript. (see footnote 1 http://daringfireball.net/2008/02/flash_iphone_calculus )

Thanks to you and the parent commenter for a very insightful response.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#213

Post by Tamerlin »

Keyframe wrote: post #86
mcbain wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is Microsoft's track record for spinning off companies? The Photoshop/CS part of Adobe is somewhat profitable, correct? Would MS let it go (even for a bucket of cash)?

Softimage was bought for a purpose and spun off later. It was bought by Microsoft to port Softimage|3D (and develop XSI) for NT platform - to show NT is as powerful for those applications as IRIX was. It was done, and it was sold later to AVID, now Softimage is part of Autodesk. On a side note, I always thought Autodesk was Adobe's natural predator, I was expecting a buy offer from them.

MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It had a lot of potential, particularly since MS could have parlayed it into a part of the premiere games development platform, but they bobbled it pretty badly and ended up with trueSpace instead, which has really never come even close to living up to its potential.

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.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#214

Post by thebigshane »

Sandman wrote: post #200
watty wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft isn't stupid. They won't make Flash Windows only and they won't make Flash Windows Phone 7 only.

Why wouldn't they? What would be the benefit of offering Flash for Linux, or Mac OS for that matter? Actually, why would they make a Flash plug-in for any browser other than IE? It seems to me that a reasonable thing for Microsoft to do, after acquiring Adobe, would be to discontinue Flash support for any OS other than their own, and to stop making plug-ins for other browsers, which would help IE regain some (if not…

Because Firefox is reaching 50% of the browser market (I recently read that somewhere on HN) and if they make it IE-only, content producers are going to stop using flash.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#215

Post by joe_the_user »

rbanffy wrote: post #195
joe_the_user wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"it makes perfect sense for both of them..." "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 si…

> What could possibly go wrong. The combined corporate mass would exceed the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit and they would collapse into a black hole?

In the case of Microsoft, one might argue that has already happened...

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#216

Post by Sandman »

bullseye wrote: post #209
Sandman wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they? What would be the benefit of offering Flash for Linux, or Mac OS for that matter? Actually, why would they make a Flash plug-in for any browser other than IE? It seems to me that a reasonable thing for Microsoft to do, after acquiring Adobe, would be to discontinue Flash support for any OS other than their own, and to stop making plug-ins for other browsers, which would help IE regain some (if not…

>> What would be the benefit of offering Flash for Linux, or Mac OS for that matter? Presumably it would be the same benefit that caused them to make Silverlight available to multiple platforms and browsers.

I may be paranoid, but it seems quite plausible to me that Silverlight is merely another example of Microsoft's famous "Embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy. Since Silverlight failed to gain wide acceptance on the web (well, certainly not as wide as Flash), acquiring Adobe to get hold of Flash would enable them to skip the part where their software first needs to be accepted by a significant majority of users and allow them to skip right to phase two, which is concentrating more and more on how Flash works on Windows and IE, leaving other platforms and browsers behind. Truth be told, Adobe has also been known to concentrate more on how their plug-in works on Windows than on other platforms, which meant that Flash would usually perform far better on Windows than on Mac OS or Linux.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#217

Post by Sandman »

thebigshane wrote: post #214
Sandman wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't they? What would be the benefit of offering Flash for Linux, or Mac OS for that matter? Actually, why would they make a Flash plug-in for any browser other than IE? It seems to me that a reasonable thing for Microsoft to do, after acquiring Adobe, would be to discontinue Flash support for any OS other than their own, and to stop making plug-ins for other browsers, which would help IE regain some (if not…

Because Firefox is reaching 50% of the browser market (I recently read that somewhere on HN) and if they make it IE-only, content producers are going to stop using flash.

Firefox is not reaching 50% of the browser market: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Sum.... The big news was that, according to most sources, usage share of IE dropped below 50%.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#218

Post by dinkumthinkum »

mfukar wrote: post #175
dinkumthinkum wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But continued Linux support is clearly a possible cancellation.

I don't think so. Both Adobe and Microsoft benefit from the existence of (and their coexistence with) Linux.

Perhaps you think that but I don't think they are or their shareholders see it that way. Microsoft tends to only deal with Linux or the open source world in an effort to avoid criticism. In fact, that's just too ironic of a statement and I think needs a little justification.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#219

Post by rbanffy »

joe_the_user wrote: post #215
rbanffy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What could possibly go wrong. The combined corporate mass would exceed the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit and they would collapse into a black hole?

In the case of Microsoft, one might argue that has already happened...

Yes, but the extra mass could shorten the process...

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#220

Post by rbanffy »

twodayslate wrote: post #196
jasonkester wrote: post #173

This has one major implication that makes me want to root for the deal to close: 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…

Thanks for telling me about BizSpark! I love you!

Tell that a couple years from now...
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