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Brad
Selfish Heathen
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Zone of Pain
 
2005-02-03, 12:48

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/mwsf-2005.ars

Quote:
It's a picture of empty seats at the booth for Quark, who was surprisingly in attendance at Macworld, and without any kind of protective plexiglass. Quark, the once undisputed leader for professional design and layout software, is now heavily disputed, thanks to InDesign, which partially explains why I am relating a conversation from the Adobe booth.

Outside the Adobe booth, where all sorts of AOLpeople were watching demos and learning about layers — come one people, open a fricking book — there were also many affable and smug representatives.

"When is the 2GB RAM limit going to be lifted in PhotoShop?" It's the question I was asked to ask.

The guy began his script. "Do you mean a 2GB file size limit? Because through virtual memory Photoshop has always been able to—"

"No. I mean addressing more than 2GB of RAM."

"Well, that's a result of the limitations of hardware and’"

"What are you talking about? The PowerMac G5 is a 64-bit computer and OS X can handle more than 2GB with aplomb."

The guy smiled at me, and in that smile, that thin line, was maybe the event horizon for Adobe, the same one that Microsoft found years ago. It is the point where a company has become so large and powerful, so much the market leader, so all encompassing that it collapses in upon itself.

Adobe, the ultimate cool graphics software company is doomed, not in the sense of entropy and dissolution, but like that of a gravitational anomaly that has collapsed in upon itself. It will continue to suck money out of wallets for years to come, but innovation will likely take the long dark ride down that black hole too.

And so ended the script. "Well, I'm sure it's coming, but we have a lot more people interested in smaller images than 2GB and..."

"Okay, thanks, have a nice Quark."

Every elemental particle has its day. Until something cooler is discovered, anyway.
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