Adobe does iTunes – six years too late

Adobe has pretty much been a technology follower over the last few years. It was visibly shocked when Apple stole a march on it with Aperture, beating it to the market with its copycat Lightroom product by over a year.

More recently Adobe has even admitted that its decision in a ‘fit-of-pique’ to drop ‘Premier for Mac’ in 2003 was a mistake, by re-introducing ‘Premier for Mac’ this year. So it is even more interesting that Adobe is now positioning itself with a copycat version of iTunes against both Apple and Microsoft. To add insult to injury Adobe is even showing how out of touch with customers that it is by hyping up the DRM features of its new, soon, sometime, to be released product – while at the same Apple announced that it has ‘pounded’ through the DRM issue with it’s agreement with EMI to do away with DRM altogether.

Having recently completed its buy out/merger with Macromedia Adobe finds itself in a difficult situation. Basically it has some great products, but little real vision. Adobe talks about enabling platforms whilst the world moves to Microsoft or Linux. Adobe flirts and fights with Apple. Adobe lags and disenfranchises its key customer base. Internally it wrangles with its sales teams and leaves customers and partners guessing what will happen next.

So why is Adobe getting into the iTunes me-too game?

Well, it’s simple – the next play will not be for the desktop, the next play will be for the STB – that’s Set Top Box. Adobe is desperate to utilise one of its major assets – Flash. It did well with YouTube and it needs to repeat that for the set top box – the simple reason is that, you the punter pay through the nose to watch, record, review and plan your TV viewing – Adobe are after your ‘viewing’ Dollars.

The next few years will see major developments in the commoditisation of viewing video – Bill Gates got it when he bought WebTV (prematurely), Steve Jobs got it when he introduced iTunes Video and AppleTV – perhaps Adobe’s Bruce Chizen has woken up from his ‘Rip Van Winkle’ sleep and realised that he may want some of it to.