Are Apple and Adobe at war over Aperture?
In October last year Apple announced its first foray into the professional photographic marketplace with the launch of Aperture. Whilst the product was quite CPU intensive, it garnered immediate popularity from the pro/amateur market – traditionally a stronghold for Apple already with its lead in the creative marketplace.
The news apparently came as quite a shock to Adobe, who along with Apple, hold massive sway in the rapidly growing digital photographic marketplace with their own Photoshop software platform.
The news must have been even more galling for Adobe which was then in the midst of the final phase of a takeover of Internet and multimedia company Macromedia. In 1998 Apple had bought the rights of one of Macromedia’s video editing products called KeyGrip, it improved and re-launched the product in 1999 at NAB as Final Cut Pro – now one of the most successful video editing packages on the market. The original team for KeyGrip had ironically come from Adobe and produced Premier, which until that point was the market leader in desktop video editing for both Mac and PC. The uptake of Final Cut Pro in the Mac market was so rapid that Adobe later dropped support for Premier on the Mac and focussed on the PC market instead.
In January after the completion of the Macromedia takeover, Adobe held a worldwide event for its employees in the Bay area. Allegedly, at this event an Adobe exec publicly vented ire and shock to employees about Aperture’s release. They then announced the release of an early Beta of their own product called Lightroom, a product so similar in appearance and functionality to Apple’s Aperture that most people would find it difficult to tell them apart.
It now transpires that the team that bought Aperture to market was probably some of the original team that started what became Adobe’s Lightroom. With the release of a commercial working version of Lightroom still some months away, Adobe have been very actively promoting and keeping the Lightroom in the press with frequent updates.
Apple released a major update to Aperture last week, improving much of the functionality and feature set, as well as dramatically improving the performance of the product across the range Apple platforms. Allegedly this has so annoyed Adobe, that rumours of threats between the companies have been passed through various ‘back channels’. One such threat being that Adobe would consider dropping or delaying support for Apple’s new Intel platform products with the upcoming version of Adobe Photoshop CS3. Whilst we re-iterate that these are just rumours at the moment, history could point to a precedent. Clearly any threat from Apple on Adobe’s ‘cash cow’ could have a long-term impact on Adobe’s stock value.
Meanwhile, it seems fairly obvious that the next step for Apple, would be to take the small leap and build-in similar functionality to Photoshop – effectively much of this has already been added with the Aperture 1.5 release and it would be somewhat trivial for Apple, with its lineage of Paint programs (remember MacPaint and MacDraw?) to add the functionality to Aperture.
Since the launch of the original Mac the two company’s fate have been tightly tied together, perhaps this spat is just a spat, or perhaps the two companies are on seriously divergent paths.
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