aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, May 02, 2008

Jobs is up to something, something big.

So says Robert X. Cringely. He says Apple was quietly shopping around their pro-apps (Aperture, Final Cut Pro, Logic, and Shake) at NAB in Las Vegas and suggests he has figured out what Jobs is up to:

To my knowledge we haven’t yet seen Apple include that H.264 video encoder/decoder chip that I have written Apple is committed to using across its entire Mac/iPod/iPhone line. Could they be inside the new iMacs that were just quietly launched? That would be interesting.

It seems obvious to me, however, that there is only one real reason why Apple would sell off its professional applications and that’s to avoid antitrust problems when/if Apple buys Adobe Systems as I predicted at the beginning of the year. Final Cut Pro competes directly with Adobe Premiere. While in my opinion the Apple video software is clearly better, Jobs couldn’t be at NAB trying to sell Premiere—software he doesn’t yet own. Maybe there’s a planned bait-and-switch, seeing who is interested in Final Cut then trying to shift them to Premiere.

The major point here is that Adobe is in play, or at least Apple thinks so. The company has plenty of cash and stock to do the deal and plenty of incentive, too. Apple’s goal in acquiring Adobe would be to control first Flash and second Adobe’s emerging Air application platform. Adobe announced this week a broad industry initiative to extend Flash to mobile devices, but Apple wasn’t a participant. Why bother if you intend to shortly own Flash outright?

Owning Flash and merging it with QuickTime would give Apple near-total dominance of Internet video, furthering the advantages of iTunes and shoring up in the process the iPod franchise. They’d be giving up a sports car in Final Cut Pro, but end up effectively owning the road instead.