Holy kitchen-appliances. I didn’t see this coming. But I can’t say that it will be that bad of a thing (we’ll just have to wait to see what Ken says).
I’m a user of products from both companies. From Adobe I use Pagemaker (because I can’t afford an upgrade to Indesign), Acrobat, Photoshop and, on rare occasion, Illustrator. From Macromedia I use Homesite more than anything (and have long before it was a Macromedia product), but occassionally use Dreamweaver and Fireworks (haven’t gotten really into Flash development). Both companies develop competing products that each have features that the other should have, and it will be nice to quit seeing them try to one-up each other all the time.
My concerns:
- GoLive had better not replace Dreamweaver, as Dreamweaver is far superior and extendable.
- Homesite better not disappear. While I know there are a hundred good text editors out there, Homesite is what I’m used to and what I’m good with. It’s got it’s quirks, but many of the solutions I’ve tried do, too. Homesite’s original developer asks the same question.
- Adobe is a big supporter of the SVG format which competes directly with Flash. While SVG is a W3C-approved format, Flash is far more mature as a platform for Web applications. Which one will live?
- While I’m not a big fan of ColdFusion, I know a lot of people who are. Adobe better not kill development for that, otherwise they’re going to anger a lot of people (or convince them to move to PHP).
Anyway, this is interesting, and will be fun to watch (and again, I’m sure Ken, who knows more about all of this, will contribute more later on his site). Mezzoblue has some good thoughts on this and he also links to other blog posts with lots of great questions. Here’s a comment from a guy that works at a newspaper
Comments
That’s not the link I got, Jake. Here’s the right one: Adobe to acquire Macromedia
Fixed paul. Thanks. Also added some more links.
Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion
Adobe Systems Inc. has reached a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia Inc. for US$3.4 billion in stock, the company said Monday.Source: MacCentral And then there was one… This is a bombshell, and is not good. Not good at all. Competition…
Adobe to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion
This is a bombshell. What will happen with all the overlap in software lines?
Firefox 1.1 will support SVG natively, so that might get the ball rolling even if Adobe decide it’s not worth persuing anymore.
I dont think you have to worry about Adobe getting rid of Flash. I think they will probably incorporate some of the functionality of flash into Acrobat and some of their other products though, which would definitely be cool.
In their FAQ Adobe said that Flash will play a big part in the new combined company.
What does SVG have to do with Flash… AFAIK one is a mathmatical way of drawing images that expand and contract indefinatly and never lose detail/or gain jaggies, and flash is a frameworks for creating interactive content targeted for the web….
Mark: SVG and Flash are both vector image formats meaning that they BOTH can expand and contract without losing detail. SVG was, eventually, to become a competitor to Flash, but Flash matured while SVG really hasn’t.
My brother used to work for Macromedia. They and Adobe have/had several patents that overlap and have caused a bunch of lawsuits. Meanwhile, the upper management at Macromedia was always concerned with getting rich. I think that once they realized they weren’t going to win as many of the key patent battles as desired, their ability to get rich versus run a nice business caused they to look short term. This buyout probably reflects their success in maximizing their short-term gain.
I’ve just upgraded to InDesign – just call it version 8.