Why the demise of Apple's Aperture is bad news for all Raw shooters

So Apple have said they are no longer going to develop Aperture, effectively walking away from the   'Prosumer' market going as far as to recommend Adobe's highly featured Lightroom.Though I have never been an Aperture user I regard this as a very sad, if rather inevitable day.Inevitable in that I have suspected it sales were tiny and know no one who uses it, and sad in that it is another sure sign that Apple have no interest in supporting niche products which do not have mass market appeal, but if no one was buying it who can blame them?

But there is another reason why this is bad news for anyone who shoots Raw and uses dedicated software such as Lightroom or Capture One.

Any market place or competitive arena where there are strong players tends to make you and I the customers the winners, competition making everyone raise their game accordingly.

I don't suppose the demise of Aperture will make a huge difference to the team over in Denmark at Capture One who's focus is on quality above anything else.

I imagine however the scenes when the news broke of Aperture's demise broke at Adobe HQ the scene may have been somewhat jubilant, seeing a fellow 'big beast' leave the fray, leaving the way clear for them to further dominate the scene, with Apple gone, there is no need for them to watch their rear view mirrors any more to keep an eye on Apple just incase they came up with a game changing feature set.

Happy days for Adobe in particular, but I suspect that in the medium to long term this will be bad news for raw shooters, no matter what software they use, competition breeds success as the saying goes, and I suspect that the pace of development will not be quite so frantic as it was.