Migrating to open standards is the right thing for Adobe to do, but that's not how Adobe likes to do business.
Adobe is lazy. If there's a problem with their software, they'll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn't work, they'll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It's a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software:
CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001). Prior to CS5, they were still using the Mac OS 9 GUI APIs, which, though they weren't officially totally deprecated until June 2007, were obviously always just a transitional compatibility environment. Even prior to the official deprecation of the Carbon UI APIs, Adobe had plenty of reasons to port to Cocoa. Number one was to provide a truly OS X native look-and-feel, which is pretty much impossible to emulate via Carbon.
Adobe's approach to dealing with Flash performance on OS X has been similar. When people complained that video playback was unreasonably slow (ie eating up 5x the CPU time that a standalone player would use), they blamed Apple for not providing them with direct low-level access to the video decoding hardware. When Apple called their bluff and gave them exactly what they asked for, Adobe released a flash player that used those APIs but wasn't noticeably faster for anybody, and introduced several new glitches that made it a step backwards for everybody who's Mac predates the NVidia 9400M chipset.
On the Windows side of things, Adobe's PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog that third-party PDF readers have garnered significant market share in spite of their lack of support for most of the recent advanced features of PDF. If Adobe would take better care of their PDF implementation, it would be good for the progress of the format overall.
Further back, Adobe kept their font format (PostScript Type 1) proprietary and expensive so long that Apple had to create TrueType, and Apple ended up licensing it to Microsoft. Several years later, Adobe abandoned Type 1 in favor of co-developing a TrueType-based successor (OpenType) that is finally re-unifying the font market.
Adobe seems to think they're playing it safe by being the last rat off each sinking ship, but one of these days, they'll be too slow.
CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001).
By that standard, iTunes still isn't native. Apple always positioned Carbon as a fully supported and native framework. They even promised 64-bit Carbon support in Leopard before yanking the rug out right before it shipped, which no doubt rendered a lot of work by Adobe useless. I would have preferred it if Apple had officially deprecated Carbon many years ago. But instead they kept updating it and saying it was supported; there's no reason to blame Adobe for believing them.
Of course I agree there's plenty of reason to blame Adobe for Flash being a steaming pile on anything other than Windows.
Apple said Carbon was a fully supported framework because that's what their developers needed to hear in order to switch to OS X. In reality, even Adobe was smart enough to not use Carbon for any big new projects (Lightroom uses Cocoa on OS X). By the time Apple pulled the plug on 64-bit Carbon, it was clear that the only reasons for its continued existence were Microsoft Office and Adobe CS. Apple was well on their way to having a suitable replacement for Office, and their Pro Apps suite was missing only the hole that CS fills. Neither Microsoft nor Adobe was paying Apple to keep Carbon alive, and Adobe in particular was setting new records for unimportance to Apple because Apple was too busy taking over the consumer market with their Intel machines to really care much about pro tools. (Apple would have had to worry about Microsoft not following them to new APIs if not for the facts that Office doesn't need to go 64-bit, and Microsoft needs to keep Office on the Mac in order to prevent open file formats from catching on.) Adobe wouldn't let Carbon go quietly, so they forced Apple to play the bad guy in killing Carbon.
When Apple has moved on to a new technology, support for the legacy technology has generally lasted about 5 years. If they wanted the more demanding apps off of it, it made sense to close the door to 64 bit. Apple has put considerable effort into optimizing the OS. It didn't make sense to do that for legacy support. Apple certainly does care about pro apps, and has done many things that can/do enhance apps developed for current technology.
Photoshop showcased the Mac as a performance platform for some time Previous to OS X. I think they played hardball with Apple, trying to bully them into using costly Display Postscript licensing for OS X, and lost.
At one point Adobe engineers would interviewed by MacWeek magazine and talked about development. Sometimes managers forced them to do Windows code first because they hated it so much. They described it as working in a sewer. The Mac was far more advanced below the surface of the OS. Color matching support evolved far earlier. Simple things like anti-aliasing an image when scaling it had to be reinvented in every Windows app, but it was an included service of the Mac OS. Clearly the engineers loved Apple even pre OS X. It's too bad that Adobe trying to strong-arm control of a key technology in OS X placed some distance between the companies. The Mac market and In retrospect Apple did the right thing avoiding the proprietary lock. Going with more open standards, and sharing some things they develop has been good for most of us. (except those wanting proprietary lock in)
The sad story is that Apple could deprecate Carbon all they want, but if Adobe, Microsoft, Quark and friends kept using it, Apple would need to oblige. Apple had no power, and these companies were basically "too big to fail" so to speak.
It's also not the first time Apple got bitten by this problem (although to be honest given the number of massive changes they carried in the last 10 years or so, they kind of were asking for it ^_^).
> Adobe's PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog
It makes me feel old to remember a time when Adobe reader didn't suck.
The great PDF support in OSX is one of the things that's most jarring to lose when I use a Windows machine. It's incredible that you have to download a third-party utility just to view PDF files on Windows properly, and none of the options even comes close to Preview on the Mac. In fact, the only aspect of working with PDF files that does suck on the Mac is Adobe Acrobat itself.
I remember Acrobat Reader not sucking up to about version 5 (PDF 1.4, circa 2001). Perhaps not too coincidentally, this is about the level of feature support that most non-Adobe readers have.
Only twice in the past year have I encountered a PDF that didn't work in Preview.app. The first was a PDF of my own creation: I was using LaTeX Beamer as an alternative to PowerPoint, and I embedded a 3d model in the presentation. The other file was a two page brochure where the two pages were individual attachments to an otherwise content-less document. (This was stupid enough that I think we can probably blame it on authoring tools making it too easy to use the fancy features and too hard to do the right thing, ie. concatenating the two documents.)
Imho the moral with Adobe/Acrobat and other such cases (eg. Microsoft/IE) is that when a company starts piling up features on their winning horse to take over _other_ fields, they may very well win that battle, but in the long run they'll have such a bloated messy piece of software that they will lose the war.
There is also a certain irony in that Adobe and friends dragging their feet in supporting Cocoa and Apple's latest stuff, was one of the reason why Apple waited so long to drop Cocoa... and now is so allergic to devolve any control of their platform, including to Flash/Adobe. :)
(note: I am not saying this is the _only_ reason, and I am happy to accept there are other reasons. But this definitely didn't help).
Of course porting to Intel first, and to Cocoa later costs a lot of money and men-hours for what is no appreciable difference to the end user (unless they are geeks and therefore know what goes on under the hood). So I don't completely blame them for that: Apple seems to be in a transition every other year!
As for Flash GPU acceleration, the fact that Flash performed so much worse than VLC seemed to already show Adobe wasn't being completely honest. Surely if VLC can, a company like Adobe should have no problem!
Adobe is lazy. If there's a problem with their software, they'll blame it on somebody else, because talk is cheap. If that doesn't work, they'll wait until the last possible moment to actually put in the time and effort to improve their code. It's a pattern that is most evident with their Mac software:
CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001). Prior to CS5, they were still using the Mac OS 9 GUI APIs, which, though they weren't officially totally deprecated until June 2007, were obviously always just a transitional compatibility environment. Even prior to the official deprecation of the Carbon UI APIs, Adobe had plenty of reasons to port to Cocoa. Number one was to provide a truly OS X native look-and-feel, which is pretty much impossible to emulate via Carbon.
Adobe's approach to dealing with Flash performance on OS X has been similar. When people complained that video playback was unreasonably slow (ie eating up 5x the CPU time that a standalone player would use), they blamed Apple for not providing them with direct low-level access to the video decoding hardware. When Apple called their bluff and gave them exactly what they asked for, Adobe released a flash player that used those APIs but wasn't noticeably faster for anybody, and introduced several new glitches that made it a step backwards for everybody who's Mac predates the NVidia 9400M chipset.
On the Windows side of things, Adobe's PDF reader has been such a long-standing resource hog that third-party PDF readers have garnered significant market share in spite of their lack of support for most of the recent advanced features of PDF. If Adobe would take better care of their PDF implementation, it would be good for the progress of the format overall.
Further back, Adobe kept their font format (PostScript Type 1) proprietary and expensive so long that Apple had to create TrueType, and Apple ended up licensing it to Microsoft. Several years later, Adobe abandoned Type 1 in favor of co-developing a TrueType-based successor (OpenType) that is finally re-unifying the font market.
Adobe seems to think they're playing it safe by being the last rat off each sinking ship, but one of these days, they'll be too slow.