RawShooter bought by Adobe

Market concentration ahead! While Adobe just announced buying Pixmantec the designer of RawShooter, a very good utilities program to handle RAW files (digital photography images, uncompressed, straigth out of the digital camera sensor).

For me, this looks like food for thought. Indeed, while buying a product (partially) in competition with its own, Adobe is actively participating to a reduction of competition and diversity of its adversaries. For the graphics company, this is a very obvious and needed move. There’s no question about that. But, for the photo user, there are two ways to analyze this news. An optmistic and a pessimistic. The optimist reader will think that digital photography is now mature enough that competition is no longer needed (and possible) on such very small periperal tools, and they will soon be fully integrated into larger software programs (Photoshop following Microsoft on the path to integration of more and more software tools – simultaneously frightening some of its competition). The pessimist reader will see the offer diversity being reduced significantly like the consumer choice.

I’m more on the optimistic side, but I will let you choose your side.

Source: DPReview.

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