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Comment by Lammy | Hacker News Reader

> Such bad luck.

Not just luck — Adobe were fighting dirty with a look-and-feel lawsuit against Macromedia for use of tabbed palettes: https://web.archive.org/web/20010516014855/http://www.adobef...

“Adobe's tabbed palette, used throughout Adobe's products, are being copied by Macromedia® in many of its products, including Macromedia® Flash™ 5, Dreamweaver®, FreeHand® and Fireworks® software.”

Compare the infringing tabbed palettes of Flash 5 to the non-infringing (vertically-stacked) palettes of Flash MX:

- https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/macromedia-flas...

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fyi, Macromedia had a counter law suit, and both eventually settled.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-30-fi-techb...

(fyi, I worked for Macromedia, and work for Adobe).

I'm kind of surprised Apple didn't sue literally everyone for ripping off the MacPaint interface. I know they had the more general Look-and-feel lawsuit against MicroSoft, but they didn't seem to capitalize on Bill's great UI innovations.

Don't think they did it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Adobe and partially Microsoft were the only things keeping Apple alive in the early to late 90s.

Apple was cornered in the creative market, and even slowly failing at that. Antagonizing Adobe could have meant them pulling out of the Mac market and probably bankrupting Apple.

Microsoft had a deal to keep Office running on Macs, I think they got cash and Apple shares.

> Adobe and partially Microsoft were the only things keeping Apple alive in the early to late 90s.

They didn't do that out of pure goodness either. The Microsoft antitrust action began already in 1990 - many years before Windows 95 would enter the market... they needed Apple to be a viable alternative, simply to avoid being broken up. And Adobe didn't wish to be completely at the mercy of whatever Microsoft decided to do with their platform either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

this is weird revisionism .. Apple's dollar volume many multiples of Adobe. It was Adobe that was in scarcity mode. It was MSFT that was crushing things left and right. I think Apple behaved like predatory jerks in MSFT-envy at times, but the reality it complicated.

It's not weird revisionism... MacOS was lacking quality apps and was barely hanging on until 1997.

Adobe creative apps and Microsoft Office kept MacOS from becoming a toy OS, like Amiga.

> MacOS was lacking quality apps

this is also spectacular revisionism .. multiple categories of desktop software appeared first on the Macintosh computer i.e. they were invented for mass production on the Macintosh. Photoshop is not the only one like that. What happened quickly was MSFT expanding with contractual license agreements into huge markets and making one of the founders into The World's Richest Man for more than twenty years without fail.

MSFT had a famous mistreatment of graphic designers or other commercial artists, in complete opposite to Apple where the creative people thought they were the center of the media world. Some people do not take visual arts, print or the like as anything but "toy", apparently. You are reading type right now.

At any rate, there is a saying that says something like "Washington DC, Los Angeles Hollywood, Silicon Valley -- they all have intense inner groups and they all think that they are the center of the world. Of course the world is bigger than that" MSFT delivered desktop computers to the world.

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