Is Adobe self-sabotaging their PC products?
It should come as no surprise to those of us who are involved with the development of the web that Adobe is selling software for the Apple Mac faster than ever.
One might be reminded of their publicity blunder a few years back now, where Adobe – a long time Apple partner – quite publicly admitted “PC’s are faster”.
However, it appears times have changed. Adobe no longer carry the “PC Preferred” flag, and it is quite obvious that Adobe is seen as a spearhead developer for the Mac platform (a fact which is recognised and exploited by the most unscrupulous of tech-wise individuals).
It is also quite painstakingly obvious that Adobe have completely missed the target with their CS3 and CS4 software for Windows, where their software suite is highly unstable, bloated, and sluggish.
To quote an old friend of mine; “I’m pretty much entirely on mac nowadays. [..] the stability of the adobe suite on mac hardware is impossible to beat on a pc.”
He’s absolutely right, of course. Adobe’s software performs faster and a lot more reliably on a Mac, despite the PC’s technological superiority. Some may argue that the difference is platform specific, but as a developer I dispute this. I don’t dispute, however, that it’s possible (and common practice) to target code optimisations for a specific platform.
It’s not just poor PC code and crashes that are the issue, either. Things which have been totally broken on the PC in Premiere since version 6 remain broken, such as the AVI export feature (DV works.. everything else? not a sausage.)
The title of this post may be misleading, since I’m more talking about Adobe apparently directing their development team resources away from the PC and towards the Mac as opposed to any act of internal sabotage, but the net effect is the same.
Anyway, rant over. I’m a PC enthusiast, with plans to purchase a Mac in the short term for the purpose of compiling applications. I’m always going to be a PC enthusiast, I think.. the lack of upgradeability and things to tinker with on the Mac will probably bore me rather quickly.
