That Adobe has the Mac at a relatively low priority seems obvious.

I’m not slamming them, I’m simply disagreeing with that strategy.

You said that Adobe didn’t “got off their asses to develop their own all-in-one post-production tool” until Apple introduced Aperture. This is not fair to Adobe, Lightroom was already in development. Aperture helped save Lightroom, only because Aperture proved that there is a market for that kind of app; without a market there is little point to develop anything. Adobe knew that Apple would be first to market, they had to keep pace.

And they didn’t rest on their Photoshop laurels either, Adobe was hard at work on Photoshop CS2 at the time: “It’s fair to say that some thought engineering resources used on Shadowland [Lightroom's code name] might better be used on Photoshop.“

Engineering resources are not infinite, it can happen to anyone. Recently, Apple had to make a choice between Leopard and the iPhone: “We had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our WWDC in early June as planned.“

There’s no reason to slam Adobe for this.

“I’m not so sure Final Cut is “vastly” superior - Premiere still has better rotoscoping than Final Cut - rotoscoping is used for things like “lightsaber illumination”"

There are certain of Premiere’s features that may best Final Cut, but on the whole FCP is much superior. The reviews have certainly said so. PC Magazine just gave it 4.5 (out of 5) and named it their Editor’s Choice. In that review there are comparisons to Premiere.

I certainly don’t rule Adobe out of this. FCP has a nice head start now (due to Adobe letting Premiere languish), but they’ll have to keep on their toes. That’s just the kind of competition I want. We all win when that happens.

I never said that. I never even implied that. Adobe (wrongly) thought the Mac was going down the tubes 10 years ago, and ignored it.

They (wrongly) thought that by killing Premiere they might make an impact on the Mac and its ability to become a digital video workstation.

Now they’re crawling back with Premiere (a good product), which I said is a good thing. And Apple kick-started them into releasing Lightroom. It’s a shame Adobe couldn’t get credit for introducing the all-in-one post production tool, but the fact is they had zero incentive (except better business sense) to release it until Apple did so.

What Apple has done for Adobe lately is give them an explosion in growth for their products that far exceeds (on a percentage basis) the kind of revenue they’d make on Windows. That Adobe was not smart enough to see this (in some way, even now they don’t see it) is their problem, not Apple’s.

Most of what’s in the article are actually reasons to do just that. “

I think that assumes Apple could buy Adobe and get them to emphasize the Mac (or even treat them equally). It doesn’t work that way. When you buy a monolith, the monolith doesn’t change. Buying a small company is one thing, buying something like dobe is quite another.

Which proves my point. I couldn’t care less which one’s development began first. It’s clear Lightroom would never have seen the light of day had Apple not released Aperture. Once released, Adobe got off their asses and made Lightroom into something they could actually deliver.

I ran the Lightroom beta for three months. It’s a fine product, but we never would have seen it if Adobe was left to their own devices.

“Shake was killed, and there is no substitute yet in sight. Logic is moldy already” Is that so? That sucks! I don’t use those products, but Apple should certainly keep them up to date, though, obviously, they have a lot on their plate right now.

My thoughts: Apple could craft an Acrobat/Distiller killer with little effort. Preview has a smaller feature set, but performance-wise blows Adobe out of the water. Apple could use GIMP code with a nicer GUI to kill Photoshop. Maybe they should. Flash, I agree, is awful–particularly with its increased use in advertising. But, it looks to me that H.264 will put a nail in Flash’s coffin; YouTube is trending towards H.264, and YouTube is by far the most USEFUL use of Flash.

First: Adobe has made incredible efforts to put a whole suite of enormously complicated code apps through every transition Apple has jerked them through, sometimes without previous warning. It happened to produce OS X versions of their apps when the OS support wasn’t there, plugging the holes themselves (something Quark rather didn’t and see the results). That costs money.

Second: what has Apple done for Adobe lately, other than deciding to kill Carbon 64 and so trying to force a brutal code migration to Cocoa if Adobe decides to explore doing 64 bit versions of their apps (that goes for all multiplatform vendors out there, by the way)?.

Apple buying Adobe would mean the usual: code stagnation and abandonment. Shake was killed, and there is no substitute yet in sight. Logic is mouldy already, and its Windows version (lots of users) was killed outright when Apple bought eMagic (but then it is Apple, so if they do it is OK, isn’t it? Somebody ought to point out the corpse trail of adquired and killed apps behind FCPro, sometimes).

Illustrator will die once people get used to the features of CS3.

I would look for Apple to eventually make an iPhoto Pro

Hell yeah!

Most of what’s in the article are actually reasons to do just that. And, no, I don’t think Apple should end Windows development in the case … Just make the Mac versions of PS and co. as good as they once were …

The development of Lightroom began long before Apple introduced Aperture, but, as explained in this article, “in many respects, Aperture actually helped save Lightroom.”