Adobe Mac support questioned

Adobe has vigorously denied it is canning support for the MacOS after posting disappointing Q3 results. The allegation appeared in yesterday's San Jose Mercury, which quoted an unnamed Adobe engineer as saying "not going to support Macintosh". Adobe says this is untrue. Adobe's fortunes have long been pegged to Apple's, and the latter's problems over the last few years have hit Adobe hard. Analysts had predicted flat performance for the company's Q3 results, and it didn't contradict them -- it made just $152,000 (down from $53.7 million in the same period last year) on revenues of $222.9 million (down from £230 million). Profits were down because of a one-off charge incurred by disposing of 350 staff. At the end of its report, the company listed "continuing weakness in demand for Macintosh application software and related printers" as one of several reasons that may affect the company's financial expectations. The company has offered Windows versions of all its design and illustration applications -- both professional and consumer -- for some time, but raised eyebrows earlier this year when it announced version 3.0 of its consumer photo-editing tool, PhotoDeluxe, would only be made available to Wintel users. However, Adobe described the San Jose Mercury as "a very damaging statement. It is very untrue". The newspaper was quick to pull the online version of the story. An Adobe spokeswoman went on to point out that the company had only just demonstrated its forthcoming DTP application, codenamed K2, running on a Mac at the Seybold publishing conference. Interesting point to note: K2 is the second-highest peak on the planet, suggesting that, for all the sofware's qualities, Adobe doesn't expect it to overshadow the DTP Everest, QuarkXPress. ®