"Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, recently showed up with a small entourage of deputies at Adobe’s offices to hold a secret meeting..."
Ballmer's not that dumb, is he? Sounds like posturing for Apple / Google.
Microsoft Buying Adobe?
81–90 of 226 posts
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#82I've often wondered why Apple doesn't buy Adobe, kill all development for PCs, and leave Microsoft high and dry in the creative market. Just saying...
Maybe it's better to kill Office for Mac then?
I assume that Microsoft is making some money on Office for Mac. They aren't developing that product for charity. I don't see any reason for them to kill off development for the Mac, especially if they acquire Adobe.
Microsoft could use some help in the mobile market, though, so I can believe the idea of those two companies joining forces to make some headway there.
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#83I've often wondered why Apple doesn't buy Adobe, kill all development for PCs, and leave Microsoft high and dry in the creative market. Just saying...
I wonder if Microsoft is thinking the same thing. Either as a defensive move to make sure Photoshop will always work on Windows or as an offensive move and making Photoshop and friends windows only in an attempt to strangle the OS X platform.
Apple has been able to create pro level software for both audio and video editing industries. If Adobe/Microsoft scraped its mac line of products, I bet Apple would have a competing product out in 12 months that graphic designers would flock to.
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#84This would be quite interesting. If Microsoft bought Adobe, what would happen to PDF on Mac? What would happen to Silverlight? Would the next Office use PDF as a standard format? Then there's the creative suite. What would happen to photoshop? Dreamweaver (or MS Frontpage 2012 as it'd be renamed)? InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher 2012 as it'd be called)? Also think about the other side of it. The Acrobat team would b…
I don't think Microsoft is too eager to have another run-in with the FTC.
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#85It's funny but I avoid Adobe products more than anyone else these days - an 'honor' held by Microsoft for a very long time. I don't know what is worse Acrobat or Flash at this point (esp. on mac).
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#86I suppose this is feasible if Microsoft is looking to acquire Adobe's enterprise customer base - the PDF, document management, etc part of the company. Having Air/Flex/Flash might also be nice, but doesn't seem like a good fit for Microsoft's traditional Windows-centric strategy (one they should abandon, in my view - the days of owning the market via the desktop are rapidly coming to a close). What I'd love to see is…
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.
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if Microsoft is thinking the same thing. Either as a defensive move to make sure Photoshop will always work on Windows or as an offensive move and making Photoshop and friends windows only in an attempt to strangle the OS X platform.
Most designers I know would work for McDonald's before they'd use Windows :)
I know you probably aren't entirely serious but people can and do change when their choices disappear.
Fundamentalists may differ.
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#88Can everyone commenting on this please remember that Adobe produces software aside from Flash and Reader?
Those two may interfere with your browsing habits but just because you don't come into contact with anything else Adobe produces doesn't mean it doesn't have some importance in the software industry.
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#89Regarding: "Adobe's shares rise as much as 17 percent" Just a small detail, but the above bullet exaggerates the indicative reaction of the market. It was up 17 percent for an instant because someone fat fingered and bought it for $30.00 exactly at 3:08pm (Added: 12 minutes after the announcement at 2:56pm), maybe a little excited to buy in. Really it is up 10-11%, which is a strong and positive reaction, but there i…
Gotta love stock markets. A rumor arises of two CEO's secretly meeting, and stocks skyrocket instantly. I'd assume that nobody actually knows what they were discussing, if they even met. Wouldn't be much of a secret meeting otherwise.
It's really interesting, when you think about it as a system that changes in response to observation.
Can you imagine if physical systems worked like that? That observed physical phenomena would change in response to what the experimenter/observer thinks will happen?
Re: Microsoft Buying Adobe?
#90"Adobe, Microsoft expected to collapse into new black hole after getting nearly 90% of the world's shitty C++ together under one roof."
Don't know about the rest of Adobe, but the flash team is heavily intertwined with mozilla and google developers. Go sample irc.mozilla.org sometime.
Fun fact, the first JavaScript was written by a Netscaper in Lisp. The first ActionScript was in Standard ML, and now both guys work on ECMAScript :-) ActionScript's engine powers Mozilla's JS engine (yes, flash and firefox engines off the same code base!) and the Lisper guy works on V8. Get into the javascript scene and you will find the intellectual incest that is hacking.