Wow, what a dramatic re-interpretation of events.

I was using Macs primarily for graphics work in the late 90's and early 00's. The close relationship between Adobe and Apple was the reason to be on the platform then. Graphic designers and creatives were one of the few markets that Apple had left. Believe it or not, but Apple owes a large part of it's existence through the 90's to Adobe's support of their platform. In fact, Apple and Adobe signed an exclusive deal to only ship Photoshop on Mac's in the early years.

Steve Jobs left, the company floundered and almost went belly up. They sued Microsoft for patent infringement, and Microsoft settled by investing $150 million in Apple, and becoming one of Apple's largest shareholders at the time. That helped Apple survive, and it gave Microsoft a reasonable competitor, so it wouldn't have to fight as many charges of being monopolistic. Ever wonder why so much Apple advertising punches Microsoft, but Microsoft doesn't really punch back?

So, with the second coming of Steve Jobs and a fresh infusion of cash from Microsoft. Apple decided to completely rewite their code base from scratch based on what he had been doing at Next. OS9 died, and OSX was born.

And, while those were great moves for Apple as a company, Adobe was faced with a very difficult choice: whether or not to port millions of lines of code over to a new OS that represented less than 3% of the computing market. Apple was making a "bet the farm" move, and expected Adobe to come along for the ride. Then Apple was pissed because Adobe didn't jump on the band wagon immediately and pony up the millions of dollars it would have cost to port their entire suite of apps to the new OS.

Three years after the launch of OSX, Apple made another "Bet the farm" move, and decided to migrate OSX from PowerPC chips to Intel processors.

Again, not only did Apple expect Adobe and the rest of their developer ecosystem to port their applications to a new OS, but 3 years after the new OS launched, they expected another dramatic round of rewrites to accommodate Apple's business and technical decisions.

But, Adobe did begin porting their software, and in the middle of all those changes, Apple chose to start competing directly with Adobe by launching Final Cut Pro at roughly the same time that Adobe was launching Premiere Pro. A year or two following that, Apple purchased Shake a video compositing app that directly competed with After Effects.

Needless to say, relations have been a bit strained between the companies for the last 10 years.

As far as I've been able to tell, Apple makes decisions that help Apple. They tend to have a "love us or leave us" approach to their developer ecosystem.

Microsoft used to play hardball like that all the time with their developers and with companies that ran on their platform. But they got slapped with anti-trust lawsuits. They play much nicer with other kids than Apple does these days. The only reason that Apple can get away with this, is because they are still seen as the "under dog" by many. I suspect that perception might be changing.

It's been so strange to hear a lot of arguments coming from Apple fans that Microsoft advocates used to use when defending it's platform decisions. "Why shouldn't Microsoft bundle Internet Explorer with their OS. It's their platform. Screw Netscape. Microsoft can do what they want. It makes for a much better experience"

People often ask me why I use Windows 7 as a development platform instead of OSX. My response is usually a joke and a quip "someone beat me with a Mac when I was young". Frankly, it was seeing the history of Apple's treatment of it's developers. Yes, they have great products if want to tow the line and follow Apple's rules. But, beware. When Apple decides to change the rules on you mid stream, you're not going to have much recourse.

ref:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple especially http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple#The_Microsoft_...

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/history/timeline/

edit: clarity and spelling.