Microsoft Buying Adobe? • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#221

Post by rbanffy » Fri, Oct 08, 2010, 11:09 PM UTC

Tamerlin wrote: post #213

Keyframe wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compositi…

> MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly.

It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war.

They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#222

Post by etherael » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 4:34 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #211

etherael wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yeah, it's a little strange that it actually sits in the same basic ecosystem as everything else on the other side of the microsoft stack and yet manages to be worse even than the MS offerings.

Frankly even considering the vendor lock-in implicit in being wed to the MS stack, I'd take that option over CF any day of the week. That said I see no reason to choose between different degrees of poison when there's plenty of good clean water around.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#223

Post by Tyrannosaurs » Sat, Oct 09, 2010, 3:36 PM UTC

gmac wrote: post #192

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically they cross but only in the way MS Office crosses paths with Apple's iWork - that is one utterly runs the other one down. Hardly anyone is paying for Expression Studio in the way they are for Adobe CS. The people using it are doing so because it was bundled.

only in the way MS Office crosses paths with Apple's iWork - that is one utterly runs the other one down Which runs which down? For my requirements, Keynote > PowerPoint, Excel > Numbers, Pages ~= Word.

That may be so but based on sales most people who choose to part with cash pick Office as with Adobe CS over Expressions Studio.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#224

Post by vl » Sun, Oct 10, 2010, 6:29 AM UTC

chollida1 wrote: post #201

vl wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure? I can't find any confirmation, for example, they are listed as MS subsidiary on wikipedia.

> Are you sure? I can't find any confirmation, Confirmation of what? you don't specify:)

Of the fact that Rare team was spun out of Microsoft.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#225

Post by thebigshane » Mon, Oct 11, 2010, 5:52 PM UTC

Sandman wrote: post #217

thebigshane wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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%.

24%... not even close! I think the point is still valid at 24% though.

Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?

#226

Post by Tamerlin » Tue, Oct 12, 2010, 4:51 PM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #221

Tamerlin wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compositi…

> MS managed the fruits of the SoftImage acquisition pretty poorly. It worked very well. You don't see any SGI workstations running visualization software anymore and most such software now runs under Windows. I say they won that war. They never wanted to have an animation platform. They wanted to ruin SGI.

They had a lot of help ruining SGI from... SGI.

The reason that I suggest that MS ran SoftImage poorly is that under MS, Soft generated negative revenue, even though it was profitable before MS bought it. I have a feeling that it didn't become profitable again after Avid bought it though, because otherwise Avid probably wouldn't have sold it to AutoDesk.

Edit: The funny thing is that MS later acquired Caligari, and now has ANOTHER animation system, which the last I heard was a freebie under Microsoft.