Lightroom vs. Aperture: A War Begins

As it was announced by Adobe CEO at the WWDC 2005, Adobe will support Intel-based Mac and will be back with new products. If some could have thought that the temporary lack of updates for Adobe solutions for Mac was the beginning of the end; they must finally agree that Adobe is back, and ready to compete with Apple's solutions for photo and video.
First, Lightroom was introduced at a much lower price than Aperture (208€ till June, 22nd vs. 319). But Adobe does not plan to build lightroom success on its lower price, as described in details by an article published by Ars Technica, Lightroom is packed with a lot of feature and functions making Aperture looks inferior in many aspects.
Marketing wise, Adobe was very smart to pave the way of its comeback:
- On October, 19th, 2005 Apple introduce Aperture, a Photo editing solution, a entirely new application, packed with interesting features, but rather slow even on the most powerful Mac hardware at that time. In addition, the introduction price was set much too high: 499€.
- It remains unclear if Adobe was already planning to release Lightroom to compete with Aperture when Apple released it; however, Adobe offered to all a free beta version of Lightroom. Many Pro users were rather using this free beta version than investing in an expensive and slow solution, Aperture.
- Apple then cut the price of Aperture, and released a new version 1.5, much more stable with a much better support of RAW photo format. If Aperture was initially released as its version 1.5, Lightroom might have had a much harder time to compete.
Of course the war is not over, and Adobe might have only won the first battle. But Apple needs to strongly react to preserve its market share, and one could imagine that the new version of Aperture might be introduced at the NAB.