I was working on the Lightroom engineering team at the time and Adobe was heading towards killing the project in favor of a Bridge + Photoshop solution.

When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.

Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.

The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.