Last year various commentators and investment
analysts were of the opinion that it would be good for Apple to buy Adobe
Systems. There are many reasons it would be great for creative professionals if
Apple buys Adobe. While a number of analysts see this as a useful move, there’s
been no comment from Apple whether they might buy Adobe.
Apple has enough cash to buy Adobe,
with more than $250 billion in cash reserves, Apple could buy Adobe with no
debt and still have more than $150 billion in cash, leaving it with enough to
also buy car company Tesla and still have more than $100 billion. An
acquisition of Adobe by Apple would benefit Adobe’s customers, and provide
long-term value for Apple and their shareholders.
Apple is relentless and focusing on
improving the user experience. Apple products and apps emphasize simplicity and
give thought to the scenarios in which a user will want to utilize their
creations. Adobe emphasizes quantity over quality, adding more features and
tools to their apps rather than considering how they will be used. The results
is that Adobe customers can no longer comprehend the Adobe apps without Adobe
training because a small number of apps each have thousands of features and
tools.
A user could take more than six
days of InDesign classes and still not know everything within the application,
or would need more than 10 days of Photoshop classes to master the application.
Compare this to the relative simplicity of Apple’s apps, such as Keynote or
Final Cut, which require much less training.
Adobe is consistently worried about
meeting the most recent quarterly sales targets. While this may be good for
shareholders in the short term, in the long term their customers receive
products that are rushed to market and are not built to last. The Apple culture
would be good for Adobe’s product teams.
Adobe is no longer just a creative
company. While they are best known for their creative tools such as Photoshop,
they have a large and growing marketing, advertising, and analytics business
they purchased from Omniture, and their PDF forms.
During the early days of Adobe
Systems, Apple’s founder Steve Jobs expressed an interest in buying the
company. This happened after Jobs saw a demonstration of Adobe’s printer
technology PostScript which made desktop publishing possible. A decade after
offering to have Apple buy Adobe, Jobs was railing against Adobe’s Flash
platform, and how it was both riddled with bugs and energy inefficient, wearing
down the batteries in mobile devices. He found Adobe’s Flash software so bad
that he dictated it would not run on the iPhone and iPad, and publicly
criticized Adobe. Jobs was also upset at Adobe’s decision to abandon the Mac OS
for certain video applications, which led Apple to offer their own video and
photo applications. At the time Jobs appeared to take it as a personal affront
that Adobe would not offer their tools on the Mac OS.
While Flash is still not available
on Apple’s devices, Adobe has conceded defeat and effectively acknowledged that
Apple was right in not supporting Flash. This month Adobe is renaming their
Flash tool as Adobe Animate, and de-emphasizing the Flash file format as the
web community as a whole has moved on to HTML5. With the personal history of
Steve Jobs feelings towards Adobe also out of the way, with new CEOs at both
companies, making a return to the early discussion of Apple buying Adobe more
plausible.
While Apple does offer a number of
apps, ranging from Keynote and Final Cut to Photos, the software applications
business has been only a side note for the company. While Adobe’s tools run on
Apple devices, it would require a dramatic shift in Apple’s emphasis for Apple
to buy Adobe.
Via: www.agitraining.com
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