Erik Akers

As crazy as that idea sounds, thing about it for a minute or two. Why shouldn’t Apple try to buy Adobe?

Although Apple and Adobe seem put on that they are work­ing together and that they col­lab­o­rate with each other, lets face a cou­ple facts. In the three years since the iPhone’s release they have never been able to get Flash to work­ing on it. And if you want to admit it or not, Apple is attack­ing Adobe in the bat­tle for photo edit­ing and video pro­duc­tion software.

Now I’m not talk­ing about Pho­to­shop here, because I’m sure Apple knows that is a bat­tle they just can’t win. With Photoshop’s 20th anniver­sary this week it’s become so iconic that try­ing to launch a com­pet­ing piece of soft­ware would be noth­ing more then an money loser.

But iPhoto clearly looks to take some of Pho­to­shop Ele­ments mar­ket share and Aper­ture is a direct com­peti­tor to Light­room. I’m going to cover the Aperture/Lightroom topic at another time but don’t think it’s a quin­tes­sence that Aper­ture 3 launched a cou­ple months before Light­room 3 launches. What’s more is Light­room 3 as been avail­able in pub­lic beta for months so it already has a set list of fea­tures. Apple goes ahead and beta tests Aper­ture 3 to select users and adds fea­tures that I would guess Adobe can’t get in to Light­room 3 before its launch.

But it all comes back to Flash. Why hasn’t Apple and Adobe been able to cre­ate a work­ing ver­sion of Flash for the iPhone? I really doubt that Adobe is not want­ing Flash on the iPhone plat­form, Adobe loves to run out the stat that Flash as 95+% pen­e­tra­tion rate into all browsers on the inter­net. With every iPhone, iPod Touch and up com­ing iPad that is sold that per­cent goes down.

My guess is Adobe badly wants Flash on the iPhone plat­form but for some rea­son Apple isn’t let­ting that hap­pen. Again I’m guess­ing that Apple believes Flash is to buggy for use in a mobile browser or wants to try and push Quick­time as a replace­ment for Flash video on the web.

Here is the prob­lem as I see it though, the iPad can not work with­out Flash. Can not work. I don’t think that peo­ple are going to be will­ing to shell out $500 for a lap­top replace­ment that can’t show video from major sites. iPhone users are okay with­out flash because the screen is smaller, but that isn’t going to fly with the iPad’s big­ger screen. And Apple just isn’t going to be able to get web devel­op­ers to replace Flash with Quick­time in the num­bers they would need to be able to say they don’t need Flash.

The one great thing that Flash has done in the last few years is cre­ate a stan­dard­ized way to deliver high qual­ity video over the web. Instead of try­ing to catch a news story on TV you can now go to major news sites and watch the story you want on demand and let’s not for­get catch­ing up on missed TV shows on sites like Hulu. I couldn’t judge how fast I would buy an iPad if I could use Hulu on it.

So if it is Apple does have a prob­lem with Flash, why not just make a bid and buy Adobe then let Apple’s engi­neers fix what they don’t like rebrand it Quick­time and get it on the iPhone/iPad as quickly as pos­si­ble? See­ing that Adobe’s market-capitalization is $16 bil­lion today, and Apple report­edly has around $30 bil­lion cash on hand one would think it could hap­pen pretty quickly, if Apple was inclined to do so.

Will this hap­pen? I doubt it, but I think it makes a lot of sense from an end user point of view. I just don’t see how the iPad is ever going to really catch on until Flash is a viable option. Why would I get rid of my lap­top for some­thing that only shows half the web? And this is com­ing from some­one that has 3 Macs, 2 iPhones, 6 iPods, an Air Port Extreme and an Apple TV in my household.