Adobe talks Intel transition

Adobe this week minimized the impact of and defended its decision not to deliver Intel native versions of its applications before the next major releases of its software, saying that customers are looking for new features and that its customer bases will move slowly to the new Intel-architecture. Adobe, however, reaffirmed the strength of the platform and said that Creative Suite 3 would bring native Intel Mac support. "We continue to see real strength in Macintosh business. If you really look at sort of the percentage of revenue that we’ve had in Mac, it actually grew at little bit quarter over quarter, so with the Creative Suite clearly driving the significant amount of revenue on the Mac platforms," Adobe's COO Shantanu Narayen told analysts. "We’re working on the transition for Mactel with our next generation of products, but so far we continue to see customers wanting to buy the Creative Suite, the Studio, and the Bundles, because of the features that we have in the product. We’ve always found that when the features are present in our products, people will buy the products."

Adobe's CEO Bruce Chizen says that larger customers will likely move slowly to the new platform, comparing it to the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X.

"We have heard from some of our larger customers that their transition to new CPUs that are MacTel based will be a similar transition that they experience going from OS9 to OS10," Chizen told analysts in the company's quarterly conference call. "They will get there but they won’t get there on Mac for a while and we think by the time they get there, we’ll be ready with our Creative Suite 3 products."

Analysts have worried that lack of professional applications for the new Intel-architecture will slow sales of new Macs in the near-term, while reviews have noted that lack of native software such as Photoshop affects the value proposition of new Intel Macs.

Last month, the company released Lightroom 2 beta for Intel Macs, the first Intel native application from the company.

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