Adobe, one of my favorite and least favorite companies, is laying off 600 people and not exhibiting on the show floor of Macworld San Francisco 2009.  It’s amazing how a company that had amazing products like the blessed Photoshop 3.0.5 can become the company with the Creative Suite 4 Whizbang Ultimate Orgazmo Edition (for $2499.)  Someone point them to Wikipedia for an economics refresher.

I’d say the first sign of the shit hitting the fan at Adobe was when Apple owned their ass with Final Cut Pro back in the late 90s.  Kinda amusing, since Apple bought the basis for Final Cut from Macromedia, the creator of the Flash software that Adobe recently absorbed.  The second sign of doom was when Adobe decided it was better to ship crap for $1299 then roll bug fixes into the next release version of their dreck for only $399 to upgrade.

Quark used to be the butt of every customer support joke in the biz, but Adobe is determined to get to #1 in that area, too.  By God, if Adobe can squander their lead with InDesign and give the market back to Quark, while at the same time, crapping on enough loyal supporters to build enough hatred not to upgrade to CS4 from CS3, they might just go under.

I can only hope that Apple has another trick up their sleeve; something in image editing, something that would tie together with Aperture beautifully and make Photoshop look like the bloated 20-year-old crapware it is.  Cross your fingers folks. This could get interesting.