While researching the details of the new Adobe Creative Suite 3, I discovered an Adobe employee's long list of reasons why CS3 is not 64-bit. Some of them are valid, but when he regurgitated the tired old argument that compiling a program for a 64-bit environment does not make it faster, I had to wonder if he's just making up excuses for code quality problems.

Compiling a program for a 64-bit environment dramatically increases its performance in any kind of filtering, sorting, encoding, or encryption operations. I've proven this in the past (more than once, actually). Almost every program in Adobe Creative Suite 3 does at least three of these four memory-intensive operations and would benefit in some way from being recompiled for 64-bit Windows Vista.

Another lame excuse the Adobe guy came up with was that 64-bit Windows Vista has poor driver support. What does that have to do with Creative Suite 3? And since when has poor operating system quality stopped Adobe from releasing software for that platform? Heck, Adobe itself isn't afraid to release poor-quality software -- I recall my first month with Dreamweaver MX 2004 being riddled with crashes and a few non-working features, and how many times has the Flash Player plug-in crashed your Web browser? Strange how Adobe is suddenly so concerned with operating system quality and driver support when the company has repeatedly chosen to ignore the desktop and workstation operating system with the broadest native hardware support -- Linux.

One of the valid reasons the Adobe blogger lists for a lack of 64-bit support in Adobe products is the assertion that the company can't afford the cost to test or distribute a separate 64-bit binary. The challenge introduced by supporting two operating system platforms that offer different bit-ness is also a valid and appropriate concern. But please, Adobe blogger, don't tell us that there's no performance advantage and that Vista 64-bit isn't good enough for you. In the recent past, people like this were hawking similar absurdities about multi-CPU and multi-core desktop processors, but today it's impossible to find a desktop OS that isn't configured to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. As of this writing it is extremely difficult to buy or build a desktop computer that does not have a 64-bit instruction set ala AMD64 or EM64T. How much longer do we have to deal with poorly programmed "all the world is x86" software?

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Copyright 2007 JEM Electronic Media, Inc. No reprints without written permission.