I was working on the Lightroom engineering team at the time and Adobe was heading towards killing the project in favor of a Bridge + Photoshop solution.
When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.
Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.
The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
> The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.
Do you have any idea what happened? Aperture 1 was slow but it got better and since it was expensive to switch I never tried Lightroom until Apple cancelled Aperture. I was surprised to find that it was so much slower and eventually ended up getting a refund because even the Adobe support person eventually admitted that it wasn’t fair to suggest buying a new Mac just to be able to use the application.
When Apple announced Aperture, it instantly galvanized the executive support in favor of Lightroom and Shantanu made the call for us to announce Lightroom and ship a public beta in 6 weeks.
Thankfully we ran the engineering team with an iterative and low technical debt threshold. We had been shipping iterations to a private beta group.
The Lightroom public beta beat Aperture to the market, ran on PowerPC and Intel (Aperture was only on Intel Macs), and was much much faster.