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Microsoft To Acquire Macromedia?
perly-king-69 writes "The Register is reporting that 'industry sources' say that Microsoft have Macromedia in their sights. Whilst it could just be holiday gossip, if they do pull it off it could have a significant impact on the cross-browser compatibility of Flash applications."
Too bad for Microsoft that Macromedia documented and made the SWF format open a long time ago now. Even if they pulled the flash player from any platform except IE on Windows, we still have libflash.
As it is now, flash is a relatively open format, there's just no good OS flash players. But if Microsoft were to acquire them, I think flash would remain an open format for about 30 seconds. Then only Mac OS and Windows users would be able to browse a very significant portion of the web.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
... and disturbing, since Flash is finally becoming an interesting and useful way to deliver content over the Web instead of an annoying tool to do things that could better be done in plain HTML and maybe JavaScript.
But I don't think it's the whole story. If Microsoft acquires Macromedia, they also get their graphics tools, which, while much less widely used than Adobe's, are generally well-regarded. Ggraphic artists have been talking for years about how nice it is to work in an area not dominated by Microsoft (and yes, Adobe can be just as evil -- but let's be practical here; they just don't have the raw power Microsoft does.) This could be Microsoft's bid to swallow up the last major area of the desktop market they don't yet dominate.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
For those of you born yesterday here is a recap: Microsoft bought Liquid Motion back in the late 90s. It was actually a contender for about 3 months but Flash quickly surpassed it. Microsoft quietly concedes this battle. Then around 2000 Microsoft acquires Visio. Again, pushing the visualization theme here. About this time they also come out with a very capable Photodraw application that even uses Adobe Photoshop plug-ins. Clearly Microsoft hungers for visualization software in it's portfolio. And Dreamweaver is kicking FrontPage's ass. It should be no surprise to anyone that Microsoft wants Macromedia. With this piece of the puzzle they could finally off Adobe and their pesky little PDF format.
it's called hostile takeover and it's done all the time.
As someone who works in a Cold Fusion shop, I can say this wouldn't be a good thing, despite all the "yay, kill Flash!" posts.
Cold Fusion is much, much easier to develop and deploy web apps for than ASP or JSP.
Microsoft should be happy with just being the number one software company...why do they need to rule the world too?
Suppose that some "public interest" suggestion could be put to bear on MS acquiring companies in related fields....
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
And a rumor posted on The Register at that. I'll believe this when I see it confirmed somewhere that doesn't appear to be cribbing from the Reg or Slashdot.
This also assumes Macromedia wants to be bought by Microsoft, even if MS is attempting a hostile bid Macromedia may go looking for a white knight.
I could see IBM, Adobe, or Sun ending up with Macromedia in the end.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Anyways, I'd be more worried about cross-platform compatibility for anything with a Mac OS preference or that Apple is the vendor for. Quicktime, anyone? I'd sure love it is Apple would release Quicktime for Linux. Microsoft has a stronger record of cross-platform compatible products that some. They have to, by law. There are bigger and better things for them to crush (Java lawsuits with Sun being a good example), which is why they do paradoxical things like hand Apple a barrel of cash to stay afloat.
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I hate to think what Microsoft acquiring Macromedia would mean for webstandards. Dreamweaver by Macromedia is certainly one of the most popular WYSIWYG HTML editors around, and because of that there has been groups such as the WaSP have been work with Macromedia making sure it is complies with the web standards out there. Who knows what Microsoft would do with Dreamweaver seeing that is in direct competition with Frontpage.
aus.music.scrapbook
"Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which - through Macromedia's changes this year - took a step closer to J2EE."
Huh? Excuse me? Flash is anywhere *near* J2EE? Last I looked, Flash is entirely orthogonol to J2EE. It is just a media/presentation layer. That's like saying HTML or SMIL just took a step closer to J2EE. Nonsense.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
dont install the plugin then
There is a reason that I don't have flash installed on any machine that I frequently use. 98% of the sites that use flash use it for ads. Not installing flash is one of the best ways to avoid the most annoying ads.
Kent
And those flash advertisements are why I uninstalled Flash. When you need a 1Ghz or better computer just to go to Yahoo's phone book due to the flash ads that kill your CPU if you run anything less, there's a big problem.
Newsflash: The web in general and HTML and CSS specifically were not ever intended to allow an author to enforce a certain visual style. That's what MPEG is for. Simply put, you do not know what I will be viewing your web page on, and you don't need to be making assumptions that my television can display 4pt font, or my PDA feels like displaying 800x600 "content". The internet is not an electronic magazine. Get with the century.
funny munging
While we're all busy bashing MS and Flash, perhaps we shouldn't forget that Webdesigners, the professional ones nearly all use Dreamweaver and/or Flash. Golive doesn't come close to being an industry standard tool although it has improved greatly in version 6. The reason those people use Dreamweaver is because it makes webpage creation faster, not specifically easier. It also has pretty good intergation with the above mentioned server side languages.
What this will mean for DW and Flash is that MS will slowly, in one or two versions, phase out PHP and JSP intergration (they'll claim that the "customers" don't want it) and they'll add MSSQL, IIS, Frontpage and Office integration, by default, thereby making most webpages not work in other browsers or on other server platforms. They'll start adding "extras" into Flash (.NET automatic webservices and scan-your-drive-for-pirated-music stuff for free). They'll probably make a crippled version of the Flash plugin for the Mac in order to avoid the anti-trust complaints and kill the Linux one. They will almost certainly kill off the Mac versions of the MX suite ("because the sales there are so small" they'll say).
However, this will probably backfire nicely in MS's face. Coldfusion, in spite of it's ease (I've used it and it is easy), has become a major deadweight in the company, due to the advances in PHP. There is no real reason today to go for ColdFusion, given that it is expensive and the tags are proprietry. Flash already has a pretty good competitor for animated vector stuff with Livemotion2.0 from Adobe and *new* Flash only sites have all but died out because the ergonomics of the web dictate that you have to design for compatibility and therefore almost every Flash site has to have a HTML version accompanying it and that pushes up development costs and companies don't have money today for luxuries as they did in the dotcom days. This generally restricts Flash to be used as a tool for making animations.
Adobe could counter a buy out like this quite nicely in that they release their own version of the Flash plugin, thereby becoming the "standard" in web graphics that they have been running after for so long. In the resulting confusion and chaos in Webplugins, which "standard" do you think would win? MS tried this with DHTML, and even though they 95% of the browser market they don't have a monopoly on authoring, as almost all sites code for standards these days.
Mainly this would lose Adobe another competitor, because MS would certainly botch any attempt to gain designers with an MS version of Freehand. just as they have botched almost every attempt to make a competitor to Photoshop.
Macromedia also has Dreamweaver and Director, but perhaps you forgot these:
.NET, but is oriented toward code, unlike Notepad and Wordpad.
* Fireworks and Freehand -- software for creating graphics. Maybe MS wants to take on Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator)?
* Contribute -- a content-management system that lets you publish to the web without knowing HTML. As someone who has worked on many clients' websites, I can tell you this is going to be *big*.
and, since the Macromedia bought Allaire, they could get these too:
* ColdFusion -- a widely-used, tag-based web application server and language (and the easiest to learn, at that). Unlike ASP, it comes with things like administrating through a web interface, sending email, uploading files, verity searches, etc.
* JRun -- a popular J2EE Server.
* Homesite -- a great text editor that isn't as bulky as VS
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
OK, I gotta give some credit for that one.
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
Businesses that depend on Flash deserve what they get. The rule of thumb has always been and should always remain, use Flash for eye candy but don't require it for the site to function. For example, I definitely turn it off because it's annoying to have space ships flying across my screen advertising Yahoo DSL or scrolling flashing throbbing full page banner ads that would make an epileptic go into a seizure presented to you. Flash is the technological equivalent of hopping up on someone's desk and laying a nice steamy turd on their monitor. It adds color and definitely gets people talking around the water cooler, but nobody really ever wants to see it.
Today:
.NET apps and CF runs only on XP, and ONLY connects to M$ SQL server.
Developers use Dreamweaver to wrie cross platform code taht integrates with ColdFusion (which can be installed on a variety of platfors, and can connect to a variety of DB servers) and can include Flash components which run on almost all browsers, and can get data form a HUGE variety of platform indepenant sources.
Tomorrow:
The Mac versions lag behind the windows versions. The Windows versions get "extended" functionality... but only if CF is running on WinXP, and the DB it connects to is MS SQL Server. You can *still* use other things, but it's a huge pain in the ass.
Next Week:
No more Mac versions. Flash plugin is Active-X only, and can get data only from
I can only hope Macromedia looks beyond quick cash flow and actally gives a shit about the Web. Then again, given the sad state of "profit trumps all other decisions" corporate action the US is going through... *sigh*
PLEASE DON'T SELL YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL MACORMEDIA!!!
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001