Willisburg.org

Dear Adobe,

I am not a large believer in manipulating torte law over disagreements that shouldn’t be brought into a courtroom. As such, I would like to see you drop your lawsuit against Microsoft. Here are my reasons:

1) If you have to create a legal injunction to allow yourselves the ability to continue to develop and compete for their platform, it’s obvious that Microsoft does not want you developing for Windows anymore.

2) The money could be better spent on software development.

3) Since the absorption of Macromedia, you are a 700 lb. gorilla to Microsoft’s 800 lb. gorilla and have roughly a good 80% or more of the creative arts community in your pocket.

These three things are important, especially together. You, Adobe, are the value here. You do not need Microsoft, Microsoft needs you within the creative community that didn’t abandon or return to the Mac platform, which is still a pretty hefty chunk of the market.

I say you oblige Microsoft and leave the platform. Take your Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash, Director, Dreamweaver, Premiere, et al elsewhere. You have the creative community in your pocket, they will now go where you go because your tools are indespensible to them. Furthermore, if you go to a platform like Linux where there are several distros now that are at least roughly “Windows NT4/98″ friendly enough to use on the Desktop, the creative community will be more likely to follow you because the cost of platform migration will be nominal as they can continue to use the hardware they already have.

Save your money and stop developing for Windows. Since you’re already developing for Mac OS X, you’re already working with a *nix environment, thus cutting development costs further as you’d be creating for a platform and change instead of two full platforms. There’s enough printer, scanner, camera, and digital video peripheral support under Linux and BSD now that it shouldn’t negitively impact too many users. Your presence will also help to coalesce the OSS platforms and bring better hardware support to them as manufacturers of hardware tools for the creative community will follow you to the platform you’re developing for to keep their own business strong.

This would have a two-fold, win-win effect. If you’re serious about wanting to develop for Vista, Microsoft should be smart enough to know that losing you as a major platform developer would really hurt them, especially if it’s done in the middle of their next platform release. By threatening to pull due to their ham-fisted tactics, you’re likely to get what you want and need to develop for it without dropping a dime dealing with them. And if they don’t realize your value as a third-party developer, it’s no big loss because you and the rest of the creative community would be better off without them anyway. There may not be a statistically significant portion of the global desktops running Linux, but your migration and abandonment of Windows could literally make that market explode.

The name Adobe and the products you produce are strong enough to hurt Microsoft more financially than any lawsuit could, and you’d still have the freedom to do what you wanted. We will go where you go. Spend your money taking us away from Redmond than trying to sue them into giving you the privledge to continue to play in their sandbox filled with cat crap and bullies.

Warmest Regards,
Willis McClintock