Microsoft and Adobe: Strange bedfellows?
By Becky Lang
The battles of giant software and media companies are a growing source of entertainment. Google, Facebook, Adobe – they’re a 9-5 marketer’s version of a soap opera. Oh yeah, and Microsoft, that company that an exhaustingly thorough article on Wired.com reminded us existed today.
Microsoft Buying Adobe Would Solve ‘The Apple Problem’ for Both, the fact-packed editorial posed before eventually concluding that antitrust laws will declare it unconstitutional for Bill Gates to lie with Flash.
What the otherwise intriguing article didn’t spend enough time considering was whether or not it would be worth it for Adobe to become associated with Microsoft. Yes, the whispers of their joint union against Apple saw Adobe’s stock rising 10%, which means Microsoft still must, to some people out there, mean $$$. But, as was the grand lesson of “The Social Network,” true entrepreneurial geniuses know that their company is not worth its one-dimensional stock price, but is instead worth the growth potential of what the company signifies. Let me explain.
Facebook was once worth 1 billion dollars, according to an offer made by Yahoo! in 2006. But Zuckerberg was prescient enough to realize that what Facebook signified – “being cool,” social-connectedness, digital advertising – made its growth potential worth far more. (I covered this more here.)
Basically, my equation goes like this (keep in mind I’m a creative writer, not an economist):
worth=market value • (power of what your company signifies [p] • amount of time [t])
Right now, Adobe still stands for something. It’s premium-level design software used the whole industry over. Yes, it has a few lagging products attached to its name, and its constant updates stink of the Internet past, but those are areas the company could improve on. While the power of what Adobe signifies is at least a positive number, Microsoft’s is most likely a negative one.
Just look at its brand tags:
Ouch. And those are just the “e” “c” and “b” of the alphabet. It doesn’t get any prettier with the other 23 letters either. When Google is rising to become Apple’s main OS competitor, does Adobe really want to associate itself with Microsoft?
What do you think?
Is Microsoft still relevant?
Is Adobe going down the tubes, only to be replaced by future Apple-made design software ?
Will Apple’s choice to close out Flash in favor of HTML5 mirror Netscape’s attempt to close out other browsers? Or is it the opposite, Apple’s attempt to open up all browsers to a more universal Internet?