Let’s start with little piece of history: Randy Ubillos and his group created the first three versions of Adobe Premiere, the first popular digital video editing application. Before version 5 was released, Ubillos’ group was hired by Macromedia to create KeyGrip, built from the ground up as a more professional video-editing program based on Apple QuickTime. Macromedia could not release the product without causing its partner Truevision some issues with Microsoft, as KeyGrip was, in part, based on technology from Microsoft licensed to Truevision and then in turn to Macromedia. The terms of the IP licensing deal stated that it was not to be used in conjunction with QuickTime. Thus, Macromedia was forced to keep the product off the market until a solution could be found. At the same time, the company decided to focus more on applications that would support the web, so they sought to find a buyer for their non-web applications, including KeyGrip; which, by 1998, was renamed Final Cut.
Final Cut was shown in private room demonstrations as a 0.9 alpha at the NAB exposition in 1998 after Macromedia pulled out of the main show floor. At the demonstration, both Mac and Windows versions were shown. When no purchaser could be found, Apple purchased the team as a defensive move. When Apple could not find a buyer in turn, it continued development work, focusing on adding FireWire/DV support and at NAB 1999 Apple introduced Final Cut Pro. In it’s current iteration’s of Final Cut Studio Pro 2, Final Cut Server and Final Cut Express. Apple has a whole end to end solution for the digital video post production market. Apple has created direct competitors for Premiere, After Effects, SoundBooth and Encore. This was a strategic defensive move against Adobe. Adobe was of course not amused by this move from Apple.
On April 18, 2005 Adobe Systems Incorporated gobbled up Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. With this acquisition Adobe acquired all Macromedia’s technology including the application Adobe tried to destroy (Flash).
What if Apple hypothetical released an Adobe Creative Suite 4 killer. The application suite could contain a Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Flash killer. So what would these applications look like? Let’s say Apple released a Photoshop killer called Image. Imagine an application that behaved and looked like any application from the Pro Suite, an Aperture on steroids so to say. Totally GPU accelerated using Apple’s OpenCL and of course written in Cocoa. An Illustrator killer called Draw and an InDesigner killer called Layout (based on the same code as Pages) of course native PDF and with the ease of iWork and last but not least Markup a HTML5/JavaScript/CSS editor based on the Core Foundations of Safari and with the ease of DVD Studio Pro.
With Final Cut Pro, Apple roughly claimed in 10 years 50% of US professional editing market share (according to a 2007 SCRI study).
What if Apple challenged Adobe…?
February
2010
I hope so.
Currently there aren’t enough challengers of Adobe out there. (Corel is not doing well imo)