<<If you can buy it through mail order or a retailer like CompUSA, I would say it's a consumer application. People who do design may think their "professionals", but I beg to differ.>>
If you don't think that Photoshop and After Effects are utilized by PROFESSIONAL graphics artists and digital video editors, then I must conclude you are speaking from ignorance.
Photoshop is the de facto standard for PROFESSIONAL (i.e., doing it for a living) still image manipulation. The same holds true for the production bundle of After Effects ($1999 retail price) for the 2-D moving image market (video and 2-D animation).
Premiere, on the other hand, was always aimed for the consumer and prosumer markets. The release of 5.0, however, marks Adobe's attempt to penetrate the professional market with this product as well (a market currently dominated by the likes of Avid and Media 100).
Currently, platforms of choice for most of the professional image design market (both still and video) are Windows NT and the Mac OS. If you are still convinced otherwise, I direct you to the Media 100 website. They will be happy to tell you all the professional broadcasting outlets they supply. Oh, did I mention that Media 100 until this year was made exclusively for the Mac OS? They expanded this year to include NT as well. And Avid, surely you have heard of them? The pre-eminent television broadcast video editing solution was also Mac-only for a long time, having since expanded to offer--you guessed it--Windows NT solutions as well.
When Adobe says it wants to concentrate on professional applications, they do not mean a discontinuance of photoshop or after effects. Instead, they refer to ending their various pathetic attempts to enter the Web design market and most likely ending their consumer-level desktop publishing application, Pagemaker (long rumored to be end-of-life).
Further, Adobe makes more than one consumer-level desktop publishing and photo manipulation application for Windows-only that would be similarly discontinued should their market strategy change.
If Adobe's idea of "professional" is the same as yours, they are doomed to a niche market smaller than AAPL ever dreamed of.
Andrew |
