Is Adobe Playing Fool With Us

Question

Hi;
Yes this is a flame, or whaever you would ever call it. But I needed to write it in here.
Adobe purchased Macromedia. Cool. Adobe has money, what a big company, bought a major web technology. And they wanted to dominate Web, which they were successful at all. Up to here, I have no problem with whatever they did.
Later on, they decided to improve Flash. Thanks, we really needed that. But we have a minor problem. Al Mighty Adobe can not keep its player up to date, for a platform that millions of people are using, which is, maybe you have never heard of but, LINUX.
For every release, Adobe decides to release 64bit version of their player or not. Can someone please explain me what kind of "big", "responsible" company can behave like this? Don't you have money to hire couple of more people to improve your software quality to support 64bit version on a platform that millions of people are using? Some non-paid developer  can code an application to wrap your player to work as if 64 NSAPI plugin, but you can't release 64bit version of the player?
This is a total insult to Linux users or anyone feels free to choose whatever platform they wanted to use.
If you trust your product, don't release it free, so we can vote with our money. Let's see how many "millions" will buy it. Put a very strong copy protection so people can't cheat on voting (as they do with your other photo editing products). If this way is harder, just "invest" less than a cent for a Linux user, and hire some developers, so make your player up to date for Linux 64bit platforms. I'm pretty sure you can hire couple of developers with a salary you paid to a single lawyer you hired for lobbying patents and other wobby bussinesses.
I think that's all for now, anyone have something to say about it, please don't hesitate, since it's enough.

Answer 1

"I would guess that 80% of the users out there are now using 64 bit  systems..."
You would guess prematurely, or wrongly at that number.
According to several sources, Windows XP still makes up the majority of PC users (between 62 and 81% by estimates), and since only about 30% of those were 64 bit systems (by sales receipts), that makes the largest part, of the largest part, of systems in use (this doesn't mean new systems, the majority of which ARE X64) as being 32 bit.
As far as dragging feet. Microsoft has moved back the sunset date for XP three times now (it's currently set for July 2014), so they're keeping a lot of people using old 32 bit systems with that. Of course it doesn't help that Vista sucked so badly and Win 7 isn't a whole lot better as far as compatibility with other software and older hardware, but there used to be a ten year hard limit on support for ANY OS. Too many people are still using functional PCs on X86 processors with XP 32 bit, and they don't want to have to shell out $2000 for a new system to be able to upgrade to 7.
A short list of software that is still 32 bit or offered in 32 bit as well as 64 for compatibility reasons:
AIM
Skype
ICQ
Internet Explorer
iTunes
Quick Time
Windows Media Player
Opera
Chrome
VLC Media Player
Roxio Easy Media Creator Suite
Roxio Toast
Alien Skin Eye Candy Filters for Photoshop
Adobe Creative Suite Master Collection (it's a mix of 32 and 64 bit)
These are just a few from two of my systems (and AMD Athlon X64 and a Core Duo MacBook X64). There are several in that list that are no small market share in their use (iTunes, Windows Media Player) too.
"The tiny segment of Linux users that you mention was at around 4 million  computers last year. It's likely double that number at present. That's a  lot of consumer buying power..."
Compared to nearly a billion Windows systems worldwide? And almost a fifth of that now on Mac OS X?
Take a look here at how OS's stack up by tracked Internet use: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php
Linux, (ALL of Linux - Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, Slackware, etc.X86 AND X64) only makes up 2.78% of the total users.
It doesn't make good business sense for Adobe to focus on less than half of less than three percent of the people who will even consider their software, compared to the more than 88% who will.
Linux is a choice. I'll heartily agree that it is a good choice. I like it better than Windows, but I still have classes to finish and work to do that REQUIRE me to use Windows and IE 32Bit. Like I said before, limiting one's self to just a single obscure OS is not a good choice.