Adobe: Here we go again...

Eek, I'm curious - and get a poll up somewhere - that how many Adobe apps are installed on a mac than the pc?
 
Adobe has made good stuff, but they really are riding a good thing a bit far. There are freeware alternatives that will, if given a market, give adobe a very serious run for their money in the pixel pushing realm. There are alternatives to making and reading PDF's. There are other video editing apps out there. There are myriad ways to make a web page.

I like Adobe, I really do, but when they've effectively crappified Photoshop for me since version 5.5, I have real issues paying the massive upgrade price to get a more native version of a UI I like less.

I wouldn't like to live without adobe, but I certainly could. Especially since I haven't bought anything from them in a while, they could have died a year ago. It wouldn't change my workflow one bit. I would not live without my mac though. I do fear that Apple's bottom line would drop through the floor if pro graphics dropped the Mac. I don't see it happening for several years even in a worst case scenario. Other scenarios that come to mind include Apple letting that market go while they grow dominant in education again, and leverage an application base that does pretty well with content creation in its own right. YMMV
 
In Computer Arts (May Issue) they were discussing Encore DVD. There was a section in regards to the lack of a Mac version. Here it is: (Pardon any mis-spellings)

But why no mac version? "There's a number of reasons," explains Mark Cokes, Senior Manager of Digital Video at Adobe. "One is because of DVD Studio Pro and its market share on the Mac. Second, we see the DVD authoring side on Windows as potentially a larger market. We also recognise that we're late to market already; if we'd had to code it for Mac, it would've delayed things further."

Coke goes on to reveal surprise initiatives with Intel and Microsoft. "We now share engineers with Intel, which gives us access to its code," he says. "So we're really trying to get the most out of the Intel processor. We've got things Intel will give us that Apple will never give us - the Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro engineers have access to the G4 code. We do not have that."

Cokes has praised Intel for its marketing strategies, explaining that some of its engineers are already at Adobe HQ, and vice versa. With stats recently posted at Adobe.com (defunct link*) suggesting that PCs are currently miles ahead of Macs in terms of rendering speeds in After Effects, industry pundits are already speculating that Adobe is reconsidering its relationship with Apple, and may well beging to push the PC as a preferred platform for digital creators, graphic designers and video editors.

Of course, the fact that Adobe was not allowed access to the G4 for Encore DVD may have something to do with teh rumoured appearance of the highly anticipated 64-bit IBM PPC 970 chips and OS 10.3 (codenamed Panther) at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco - recently rescheduled from May to 23-27 June.

* - I did not include the link to the adobe page (since it's no longer up), but most of us have seen it. The one that ended with pcpreferred.html or something along those lines.

Edit - Thank you Arden for pointing that out.
 
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