Yes, kiddies, it's all true: last week, Quark (makers of the widely-popular Quark XPress publishing software) offered to buy its struggling competitor Adobe. Adobe nixed the idea with a "thanks but no thanks," claiming that the "friendly" buyout offer didn't actually contain many important details, including, say, a price. But Quark claims they're still interested, and we're going to be watching closely to see where this thing takes us.

Adobe's fallen on hard times lately, and they blame their slump on the Japanese recession and the Macintosh's dwindling market share. Blaming the Mac has been a wildly popular pastime these last few years, but it's certainly true that NT workstations are making some inroads into the previously Mac-locked graphics community. And don't look for the success of the iMac to make much of a direct impact on Adobe's fortunes, as they probably make almost all of their money from sales of high-end professional graphics packages like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Pagemaker-- all of which are much more than most consumers need or want to pay for. On the other hand, if Adobe refocuses its efforts and ships consumer-grade versions of that software for under $100 a title, maybe the iMac will help them out after all. As for Macs that can fight the pro-level NT insurgence, we won't see a real weapon until the release of the translucent "El Capitan" Macs early next year-- and Mac OS X several months later, of course.

Strange days indeed... A year ago if anyone had told us that Quark was going to try to buy Adobe, we'd have laughed uproariously. Of course, at the same time if anyone had told us that within a year Apple would have a best-selling G3-based consumer system and a stock price in the 40's, we'd probably have called the men in white coats; after all, twelve short months ago we were all sitting around wondering what would happen now that Steve was killing the clone market. Amazing how fast this stuff changes, isn't it?