Friday, April 28, 2006

The Aperture disaster: is it about buying Adobe?

Cringely has another explanation for the rumored termination of the Aperture team:
PBS | I, Cringely . April 27, 2006 - Killer Apps

.... There's only one way to make that happen for sure, and that's for Apple to buy Adobe.

Apple has the stock, they have the cash -- such a purchase would effectively cost Apple nothing, the market would like it so well. The Feds would allow it because this current bunch of Feds allows just about anything (just look at Oracle). Efficiencies would abound. For example, Adobe's Premiere editing program could go away in favor of Final Cut Pro. Apple's Aperture photo touch-up program could die so PhotoShop could reign supreme.

Hey, could that be why Apple is rumored to have this week just laid-off its entire Aperture development group?

Could be.
I like Cringely, thought lately I think he's getting a bit wilder. This seems plausible, except Aperture really is pretty good. It would make more sense to keep Aperture and extend it with Photoshop capabilities and the Photoshop plug-in architecture. They'd kill Lightroom though.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

FYI Aperture is not being terminated. See this post.

JGF said...

I didn't think it was terminated -- I have 3 posts on the topic and they seem to be correct given what's emerged.

Aperture was a major development effort that didn't flop like Vista, but it emerged on life support. It's getting towards usable, and Apple will fix it. It probably will take a year or two to become very good. If Apple does buy Adobe, Aperture will gain more Photoshop compatibility, but Lightroom would be terminated.