Oh my...

[Djekspek]

oh my, just read this... [link]. Microsoft please leave PS alone

[Steel General]

*shudders* -> MS-PS (very scary)

[Redrobes]

I have read a few articles on this today and until I came up with this they all seemed to me completely out of joint. None of the others seem to address the basic fact that PS is predominantly used on Macs...

[Aval Penworth]

Adobe's share price jumped 11.5% on the news...might be an offer to good to refuse, given the bad blood between Apple and Adobe of late.

[mearrin69]

I'm not entirely sure that PS is used predominantly on Macs anymore. Mac is a pretty small share of the market and DTP/graphic design is a little more widespread than it used to be. I'd like to see some stats on it. I'm pretty sure Adobe has released at least some products for PC before Mac in the recent past...something they wouldn't do if Mac was their primary target platform. Maybe I'm just misremembering though...

In any case I can't say I'd be too terribly happy about MS buying Adobe - but I know a few folks that would: the guys at Quark, the guys at Corel, etc. I'm not as much a Microsoft hater as some people but I do know that they'll change things in a way I won't much like.
M

[Midgardsormr]

I have to agree with mearrin. I suspect that most Photoshop licenses are sold for PCs, simply because Windows still has such a huge market share. Art & design schools are still addicted to the Mac, but Photoshop is in use by more people than just design school grads. And even a lot of those switch back to PC soon after graduation (I've got a PC at home myself, even though my school is filled to the gills with Macs).

[LS-Jebus]

As a part-time computer nerd, I find it odd how art schools are full of Macs, and when one asks about a good computer for art, the response is always "Mac", as though it's the Holy Grail. The funny thing is that my sister is in a photography program, and her laptop, an Acer, using Windows 7, that cost over $1000 new, has better specs in every way than the new $3000 Macs being used by others in the class. The same went for my new desktop computer. Just like buying a car, you want a certain transmission, load-bearing capacity, fuel efficiency, and various features; you don't buy a car simply because its made by Mercedes-Benz.

[Redrobes]

The thing is that Apple overtook MS in size of tech company to become whats said tp be the largest tech company tho how they come to that statement in light of Hewlett Packard is beyond me. And ok so I reckon more home computers are PCs rather than Macs and their company size is to do with ipods, ipads, mp3 players, itunes etc than from just computers or even just OS'es for computers but the fact is Apple is a gigantic company and is looking like it might well become the lead horse in the computer race right now. So when your history has been generated on the mac and ported to the PC I just don't think that this is a company that would bail out of that and plump now for the company that is shrinking instead of growing. Adobe make Flash. The biggest competitor to flash is Silverlight by MS. I think HTML5 might well eclipse both but thats not the point. Unless Adobe want to be the biggest company instead of making products and services for the biggest company then it seems like a ludicrous idea at this point to bail out and head over to join with MS.

But then I have seen equally as perplexing mergers... I would wait to see more on this before getting any anxieties about it tho.

[mearrin69]

You're right about Apple's size but also right that it's not because of its dominance in the computer market. Apple has pretty well shut Adobe (via Flash) out of its new burgeoning device market (and likely whatever future platforms it adds to that ecosystem) so I can understand why it'd be interested in siding with MS right now as opposed to Apple. PC users are Adobe's biggest customers at the moment, though it wasn't always so.

Like I implied, however, dealing with MS is like dealing with the devil. I happen to like MS fairly well as a user...but I wouldn't get *my* business/product/service near that company without digging about for my 11' pole.
M

[Ascension]

MS will just dumb it down in order to put it on Xbox and then it will die. Guess I better look into Corel.