Gee, and here we thought that Macworld Expo's online vendor database was just sorely incomplete. Instead, it appears that a glaring omission from the exhibitor list is indeed accurate, and therefore the event which Apple has described as "Mac OS X's coming-out party" will be short one very important guest: no less a giant than Adobe Systems Incorporated. This is not a drill, people! The company whose very name is synonymous with "Big-Gun Mac Graphics Software"-- the company who makes Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, InDesign, and about a gazillion other Very Important Applications to the Mac platform-- is skipping the Expo for the first time in... well, ever, as far as we know. (Adobe's certainly been at every East Coast Expo we've attended, and we haven't missed one since 1994.)

At first we just figured this was a rumor stemming from the company's hopefully-erroneous absence from the vendor list, but as agitated faithful viewer Ophion pointed out, in his latest Inter@ctive Week article, Matthew Rothenberg reports that "citing budget constraints, [Adobe] this week acknowledged that it is breaking precedent and skipping the show." Needless to say, this worrisome development has given us a raging case of the heebie-jeebies. We've always had our doubts about Adobe's commitment to Mac OS X, but to miss the coming-out party? So much for a Carbonized Photoshop in time for Mac OS X's long-awaited launch onto the screens of mainstream Macs-- not that Adobe ever promised that, of course, but it sure would have been a nice surprise.

Given that one of the Mac's last strongholds is the graphic design market, we'd go so far as to say that Mac OS X-native versions of Photoshop and Illustrator are at least as (and possibly even more) important to the operating system's acceptance and success than Microsoft Office... so you can understand our edginess at Adobe's seemingly lukewarm commitment to the platform. Yes, Acrobat Reader 5 has already been Carbonized. Yes, company spokespeople still claim that "most of Adobe's core products will be Carbonized in their next major revs." Yes, the current economy is such that skipping a major trade show due to budget constraints shouldn't seem like a particularly unusual thing to do. Still, until we're actually running a Mac OS X-native version of Photoshop on our PowerBook, we're probably going to have a funny feeling in our tummies about all this.