While Adobe and Apple are butting heads over business matters, at lease one solider in the fight wishes both parties could just get along. Senior Adobe Manger John Nack has nothing but love for Apple’s computer and brands, going back to his childhood through to today.
I love making great Mac software, and after eight years product managing Photoshop, I’ve been asked to help lead the development of new Adobe applications, written from scratch for tablet computers. In many ways, the iPad is the computer I’ve been waiting for my whole life, wrotes Nack. Discovering how to draw a car on cocktail napkins at the Algonquin Hotel at age 3 is among my earliest memories, and I can tell you exactly what I drew on my Etch-A-Sketch Animator in 1986. I can’t wait to create & share tablet experiences with my young sons.”
Put more simply, I want to build the most amazing iPad imaging apps the world has ever seen, he continued. But will I be allowed to do so And who decides
He goes on to note that customers indicate they’d like a mobile version of the imaging software Adobe Lightroom for the iPhone. He noted that Apple doesn’t sell Lightroom in their stores and that they’re somewhat capricious in what apps they will allow and what they will not.
The effect on product development & innovation can be chilling. Yes, it’s easy to point to 200,000 apps on the App Store; it’s harder to note all those that aren’t there–serious apps that will be created only if developers know they’ll get a truly fair shot to innovate & compete. Anything else strengthens alternative platforms while undermining the Apple platform. You shouldn’t care about this stuff because you love or hate Adobe. You should care because these issues affect your choices as a customer & a creative person.”
Will my decision to speak publicly about these concerns harm our ability to deliver iPad apps I don’t know; that’s up to Apple. But can you imagine a world where, say, constructively criticizing Microsoft could destroy your ability to ship a Windows application It’s almost unthinkable, and yet that’s the position in which Apple’s App Store puts us. To borrow from the Think Different campaign, ‘You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them.’ That’s what I ask for Adobe technologies: let them succeed or fail based on their own merits, as determined by customers, he concluded.
Source: blogs.adobe.com
