invbiznews.com — Adobe may rue the day it encouraged its product managers to run online blogs from its own site. It seems that the latest musing of product manager John Nack have unleashed a torrent of articles across the net from angry Mac users, annoyed that the company strategy seems inconsistent and worse still John Nack takes direct aim at abusing the very peo
Oct 31, 2006 View in Crawl 4
livefromwalesOct 31, 2006
It seems to me that Adobe are on the defensive about the way they've been treating the Mac world recently. Worse still John Nack's own blog indicates that they only develop on Macs as a charity case. Shame on you - these are your loyal customers.
wiseweaselOct 31, 2006
PPC Mac users should not be surprised to see support for their Macs dropping. PPCs are now obsolete, and it makes no sense whatsoever to port new codebases over to that architecture. It's just a reality of business that the PPC market is shrinking, especially the 3rd party software market, as the vast majority of sales are to recent computer buyers (which are all MacIntel now). Adobe is doing what's right from a business perspective. We can't expect Adobe to borrow profits from other product lines, just to cover the costs of porting SoundBooth to PPC if they don't expect sales to be high enough. Let's face it, with Apple bundling GarageBand with Macs, the market for SoundBooth on the Mac is already much smaller. We should be happy they decided to make a Mac port at all; I expect them to barely break even on that expense, if they make any money at all. Chastizing them for not investing in PPC development at this point is just counter-productive. Just to emphasize: PPC is dead! It's too bad if you bought a PPC Mac within the last year, but you should have known better. There will still be support for a couple years for most major pre-existing codebases, but for all new products, expect Intel only support to become commonplace. This is particularly true for indie software released by small developers who, more and more, won't have the PPC hardware to do any testing with. For people who say that making a Universal Binary is as simple as checking a box in XCode, all I have to say is that you couldn't be more wrong.
openallhoursNov 1, 2006Submitter
The flaw in WiseWeasels logic is that Adobe are already producing a Universal Binary called Photoshop Lightroom and have announced support for both PPC and Intel in CS3. It would be unwise of any company to ignore an installed base of 15 million machines. Just because Apple change to Intel it doesn't mean that everyone can afford to flip each time. So WiseWeasel, whilst I agree that PPC is dead - I salute you on your lack of commercial acumen.
wiseweaselNov 1, 2006
The difference is that all the CS apps are already coded for PPC. I said for NEW CODEBASES, it doesn't make sense to port to PPC. I should have emphasized that this is especially true for codebases migrating from Windows x86 apps. It could be that Lightroom was designed from the start to be cross-platform. In particular, Apple's bundling of Garageband with Macs further shrinks the potential market for Soundbooth. The numbers work out quite differently for something like CS. It's not just as simple as saying Adobe still codes for PPC on some products, so they're just being mean or stupid by not coding this one for PPC. For every effort you make as a business (every investment), there has to be a return on it, or you're wasting your time. Please spare me your obvious wealth of business acumen in the future...