Ed Moltzen

The Chart

March 21, 2007

Adobe is nearing the formal launch of its Creative Suite 3, which will be the first version of the software optimized for Intel-based Macintosh systems from Apple. (Adobe has scheduled a New York City launch for the long-awaited project for next week.)

We've also now entered a phase when Apple could formally launch the next-generation Leopard version of its Macintosh OS any day now (Apple has said it would launch Leopard in the spring, which began last night.)

Tuesday night, when Adobe released its quarterly earnings, Prudential Securities analyst John McPeake asked Adobe President and COO Shantanu Narayen: "Is there going to be (sic) any enhancements in your product set that you can get if you use OS 10.5 Leopard versus prior generations of OS and this is sort of what I am thinking about."

Narayen responded:

John, the reality is for the new CS3 products, most of them will run on both the old Macintoshes, the Power PC-based architecture as well as the Intel-based architecture. People see significant performance gains when they move to the new hardware architecture. But between the current OS that's shipping and the next OS, it's unlikely that there will be significant advantages because the next OS is not yet released. So, if Apple makes underlying changes that improves performance, customers will see it. But we don't have features in CS3 that take advantage of an unannounced and non-shipping Mac OS at this point.

Reluctant as Narayen was to upstage Apple's official Leopard announcement, whenever it happens, Adobe has been sending out word to the development community that there will be at least some specific, measurable performance boosts.