8. Adobe and Apple
Frenemies since: 1984, when Apple invested $2.5 million to buy 15% of Adobe during the development of the Apple LaserWriter Pro printer, which used Adobe’s PostScript technology.
Acts of friendship: PostScript was core to the desktop publishing revolution that may have kept the Mac platform from dying in the 1980s; applications like Photoshop (left, in its 1.0 version) kept the Mac relevant; Adobe apps such as the new Creative Suite CS4 remain hugely popular on OS X to this day.
Acts of enmity: On both the Mac and Windows, Apple’s TrueType font technology rendered Adobe’s once-essential Adobe Type Manager obsolete; Apple’s Final Cut Pro video editing software pushed Adobe’s formerly-dominant Premiere completely off the Mac platform for a spell; Adobe is working on a version of Flash for the iPhone, but Steve Jobs is not only not an enthusiastic supporter but is actively dissing the whole idea.
Current state of the frenemyship: Fairly tense, at least on the outside; behind the scenes, I couldn’t say. Ultimately, the two companies need each other.
(Photoshop 1.0 screen from Guidebook.)
December 11th, 2008 at 6:05 am
Great list, I enjoyed that, thanks. ;-)
December 11th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Great job on this, Harry. Many of us have lived through the stuff you’ve written about here, but were we really paying attention? On some levels, yes, but we all tend to be revisionist historians to a certain degree. With this article you’ve put a stake in the ground. Would love to see you do a periodic update on the same 12 — maybe adding or deleting as new frenemies develop or others lose pertinence.
December 15th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
What about nVidia and AMD? It seems like that’s a big one.
December 17th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Great article!
December 18th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Frenemies—- are they not just competitors? OR two persons/entities that have a mutual love hate relationship that shift from one end of teh spectrum to another….
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:03 am
Wow. Microsoft has many enemies.
December 30th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Not to be a grammar policeman, but it seems you spelled “enmity” wrong.
Oh, well. Pretty awesome article. That there are six pages containing Microsoft relationships says something….
May 4th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Wow, I immensely enjoyed this list. Microsoft leads the ranks with enemies on almost both ends of the list.
I’m missing the iFruad producers vs Apple on the list though. :P
http://kixtrix.com
May 8th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Microsoft and Nintendo! While it may not be cpu-based, nintendo helped microsoft get going with the xbox, which then completely left nintendo to branch out their own and is now nintendo’s biggest opponent (sorry sony). Not to mention how nintendo is so bitchy about making sure that nobody but themselves and add programs and games to their consoles, so there isn’t a nintendo game on the xbox and vise versa. And, Gates has famously said quote, “”There’s room for innovation (on the wii), but moving that controller around — it’s something that’s not mainstream for most games.” Who knows? Maybe Gates will give in to 114,000,000 dollars a year of motion-sensitivity and make a motion-sensitive Halo. YES.
June 15th, 2009 at 10:01 am
You forgot Google and Mozilla, google has always been a big but quiet supporter of firefox, and then they release Chrome…
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November 4th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Great article!I enjoyed that, thanks. ;-)