Sorry, Brandon; Apple's not buying Adobe

Brandon Watts of OSWeekly.com has posted an editorial piece on why it would make sense for Apple to acquire Adobe. My response: not happening.

See, you make good points for why Apple would buy Adobe, but couldn't you make similar points for Microsoft or even Google?

And there's another problem with your argument for Apple (or Microsoft) buying us. Adobe is committed to offering equal products across platforms. It's very important that the products we ship for Windows are just as good on OS X or even Linux and vice-versa. Sure sure, we'd still obviously release products for Windows and Linux... but don't you think the (indirect) pressure would be on for the products for those two platforms to not be of the same quality of those for the Mac? How about those anti-trust issues in Microsoft and Apple's operating systems division sharing development information with the software division in the '80s? Apple spun off their applications business into Claris (now FileMaker), and there was a lot of pressure on Microsoft to do a similar thing -- something they obviously didn't do.

Wouldn't an Apple acquisition of Adobe just refuel the fire for these issues?

Interestingly, an acquisition by Google avoids all of these cross platform related issues. Hmm. But don't worry -- we're not being acquired by Microsoft or Apple. Okay, Brandon?

Google uses Flex for version of SearchMash

Adobe has always liked Google. I've always used Google. I think we used to package some Google Toolbar thing inside Reader because Google offered us too much money to deny. Adobe Reader is in the Google Pack of software.

And Google is now showing more love to Adobe. They've always used Flash for Google Finance's charts, but have you seen the Flash version of SearchMash, Google's experimental search engine?

Actually, they created it in Flex, which is really exciting for us to see. It runs smoothly, it runs well, and it's not too resource intensive.

The search results are really accurate as well. I bet it didn't take Google long to make it.