| Monday, January 9, 2006 |
15:43 - With friends like these...
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060108-5927.html
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Those who keep saying Aperture isn't meant to be a Photoshop replacement (whether or not anyone ever suggested it was) get a free Exhibit A: Adobe is bringing out their own Aperture-killer. (Or Aperture-coffin-nailer, as the case may be.)
What's particularly interesting is that Adobe is releasing a public beta of Lightroom on January 10, the opening day of Macworld. I don't think you'll be seeing this one on the keynote stage, as Jobs isn't welcoming Lightroom with open arms. Chances are, Jobs won't be stopping by the Adobe booth at Macworld to check it out either. In fact, there are likely to be tense times on the showroom floor between the Apple and Adobe booths and if the wrong people cross paths, we may have more than a typical Macworld on our hands...
It is not certain whether it was a direct stab at Aperture or not, but an Adobe rep on a conference call I was on last week said that the motivation to release a public beta was that they felt it was a bad idea to release a major 1.0 product like this without getting broad user feedback first. Ouch! Body blow. Keep an eye out for Steve's flaming dragon punch at the keynote.
Steve had better not just tiptoe around the Aperture criticism if he wants it to survive; he might have been able to let it catch on slowly as of last week's product landscape, but now with Adobe jumping into the fray with a direct competitor that's all but guaranteed to bring with it all the advantages of Photoshop's editing toolbox (one of Aperture's big gaps), Steve's going to have to either pull out the big guns and throw a whole building full of people after this one—or concede defeat. And the latter's not really his style.
This is a time when Apple's really going to have to get down in the mud and fight if they want to win. Most of their other victories in recent years have resulted in Apple being the only game in town for as long as it took to establish a market or a product class, and then, by the time the rest of the industry caught up, Apple had hopped on ahead to the next thing. That's how they managed the iMac revolution (by the time everyone else was doing candy-colored translucent machines, Apple was on to flat-screens and snowglobes) and the iPod/iTunes (by the time the other guys had figured out how to do a serviceable jukebox, Apple had opened up the Music Store), and any number of other products where they could afford to whirl Tasmanian-Devil-like through the landscape, alter reality, and then zip away before anyone knew what had hit them. But now they've riled up Adobe right where they live, and they're all but guaranteed to take a serious bruising this time—and that's in the best-case scenario, e.g. if they win. As of last week, Apple's biggest advantage with Aperture was that nobody else had done anything like it; but now that advantage will be gone, and its shortcomings will be all the more glaringly obvious. (Besides, I think LIghtroom is probably a better name than Aperture, so that's yet another disadvantage.)
We can take this for granted, though: by the time the smoke settles, pro digital photographers are going to have some bitchin' tools at their disposal, which may never have existed if it weren't for this Battle Royale that seems to have sprung fully-formed into the floodlights. Ain't competition grand?
Via Aziz Poonawalla.
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Brian Tiemann
