Adobe bought its competitor and now ships both

Creative Suite 3 is the first release where you can see what Adobe actually bought when it acquired Macromedia, and what it bought was a problem it now has to ship.

Look at what is in the box. Photoshop and Fireworks, which overlap substantially for anyone doing screen work. Dreamweaver and GoLive, which are the same product for the same job, and one of them is now clearly dead and has not been told. Flash from one company sitting alongside a video and animation set from the other.

Adobe did not buy a company with complementary products. It bought the competitor, and the tidying-up is going to take years and annoy people whichever way it goes.

The more interesting thing in this release is not the applications at all. It is that Photoshop finally runs natively on Intel Macs.

Apple moved to Intel processors in January of last year. For the fifteen months since, the single most important professional application on the platform has been running through a translation layer, at a fraction of the speed the hardware is capable of, on machines that were sold to creative professionals partly on the promise of being faster.

Fifteen months is a very long time to keep your most loyal customers waiting, and it exposes something about how these suites are built. Adobe could not ship a native Photoshop as an update because Photoshop is not really shipped on its own any more. It arrives when the suite arrives, and the suite arrives when the least ready application in it is ready. Bundling that many products together means the release schedule is set by whichever team is furthest behind.

Customers absorb that delay and have no way to opt out of it, because there is no realistic alternative. That is the actual product of the acquisition: not a better toolkit, but the removal of the last serious competitor from several categories at once.

The applications themselves are good, and in some cases better than good. Nobody is buying Creative Suite 3 because they were persuaded. They are buying it because the files everyone else sends them open in it, and file format compatibility is a much stronger form of lock-in than any feature list.

I would expect the next few versions to be about consolidation rather than capability, and I would not want to be on the GoLive team.