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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."
...what effect would this have? It could go either way - the Mac/Linux/Mozilla users, who are in the minority, would be disgruntled by this, and would either give in, or just not visit sites that choose to use a proprietary format.
.NET is usable by anyone, but MS gets to declare what the standards are. Perhaps MS are actually becoming a little more honest, on the face of things?
IMHO, any proprietary format on the Internet is bad. Flash is all very well for doing supplementary things (games etc) but not for features essential to the operation of a website. Common sense would tell you not to use Flash for content provision, but people seem to think otherwise.
It is most likely, however, that either this deal will not go ahead, or that MS will keep the standard fairly open. Remember, MS are moving towards semi-open standards -
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
My first web development platform was Drumbeat, which became Dreamweaver Ultradev, which became Dreamweaver MX. Everyone I know who uses both MX and Visual Studio .NET still prefers MX for the majority of their database-driven web development. I'd love to have MX's ease of use and powerful design support built into Visual Studio.
What's your damage, Heather?
Maybe this will be one of those technologies MS buys just so it won't go anywhere in usage or development. I would not be saddened by such a thing. Am I the only ones who is sick of flash splash pages to websites? Just give me my content damnit. :)
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
furthering
It would be sad to see another innovator get gobbled up, I've been impressed with macromedia since the ol' Director days, it just seems shitty when a big guy buys up a brand or name then tries to pawn it off as their own.
The saddest example of late is Infogrames trying to ride the name recognition of Atari of all things! WTF? LOL
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
I'll kill myself if this takes place. If I'm not mistaken, they'd have to make some serious mods to ColdFusion or sell it because MS cannot distribute any Java based tech. without consulting with Sun first due to the lawsuit. There goes the tight Flash integration.
On a bright side, I'm glad CF's power is finally recognized:
"The ColdFusion web application server is regarded as superior to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASPs) and even Santa Clara, California-based Sun's Java Server Pages (JSPs) because of its simplicity, power and completeness. ColdFusion MX, meanwhile, uses ColdFusion Mark-up Language (CFML) tags that compile to Java."
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
What do you mean "too bad"? Anything that quickens the demise of Flash is to be welcomed. It fills a useless middle ground between animated GIFs and Java applets, and is only used for particularly irritating ads, and by particularly irritating self-proclaimed "creatives". I can only hope that Bill Gates was surfing the web one day, saw a Flash banner and decided to kill this annoying "technology" once and for all.
I wonder if (this report is in fact true) this will add fuel to the WV and MA appeal to the settlement? Can those states use post-judgement behavior to show that the settlement is ineffective and that M$ is not changing its Monopolistic ways?
"Being Irish, he possessed an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through brief episodes of joy." -W. B.
The monopolies watchers are asleep at the switch. Hadn't you noticed ... ?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Despite the utter rubish some of the typical no-clue-on-design anti-flash zealots on /. kept crapping out in recent years, flash had a clear and distinct position in WWW content.
Until less then a year ago there was no way you could get CSS working the way it was intended on spec-release about 7 years ago. Flash was the *only* way to get a consistent visual apperance across Browsers with solid fonts and stuff that went beyond table-slicing (tables not being intended for pushing pics around anyway).
Flash was *the* tool to actually achieve what CSS promised for so long. With nearly every browser finally fully CSS 2 compliant, this is now a non-issue and put's flash in the extra gadget area so many slashdotters allways suspected it in. With SVG - a format that's substancially easyer to handle in the dynamic content serving dept. - and open architecture web 3D poppingup left right and center and the mighty Java Media Framework finally out, asskick competition for flash is closing in.
Considering this and the fact that the Uber-Web Tool Dreamweaver had it's days when it's templates where the next best thing to the then expensive and unwieldy dynamic content servers this is might actually be the wrong time for M$ to purchase Macromedia. Macromedia never got the curve to professional level tools, Dreamweaver aside. Flash MX coding is as crappy as ever, Director 8.5 still tops the hitlist as the most bizare software joke under the sun, PHP kicks Cold Fusion up and down the street and no f*ckin' way is Kava or JRun gonna stand against Suns free libs and the ever-growing Netbeans popularity combined with the bazillion and one Java/Apache OSS projects.
Bottom Line: I kinda hope that M$ buys Macromedia and drives it against the wall at full speed. Hideously bloated with ColdFusion-ASP-MX.NET intergration or whatever they think might be a cool name for a dead-end product strategy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The fact that they (Macromedia) are not talking to the media is one indication and if you had read the story they are hurting financially (due to their own greed and mismanagement IMHO) and are ripe for a takeover. One that the shareholders would benefit from immensely.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
I don't think that Dreamweaver and Frontpage actually directly compete. Dreamweaver is a much more professional tool than Frontpage. Frontpage is geared more towards tasks, project management, and overall site maintenance. Dreamweaver to me has always been about modular development - building individual pages quickly and easily. Frontpage can be standards compliant and is easily extensible but it's really geared toward novice use - i.e. you might give it to a documentation team. Dreamweaver is geared toward "designers" with homesite as a good support application for straight "coders".
We use Frontpage, Dreamweaver, and Homesite. Our Communications team uses Frontpage with an IIS webserver to keep Daily Bulletins and some reference material maintained (these people have NO HTML knowledge). Our external site maintainers use Dreamweaver with Vignette and IPlanet servers for more dynamic content. Our more technical intranet sites are maintained using Homesite and Websphere, giving significant control over the code. I think eventually we'll be moving everything into Websphere/Eclipse development.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
And its not just flash, there is another Macromedia product that I'm far more worried about Microsoft getting their hands on: Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver has quickly become the standard HTML editor. Can you imagine what's going to happen if it starts making code like Frontpage does now?
.NET !
.NET would help, but Dreamweaver, if they could get their hands on it, would be a major coup for Microsoft...
My bet is that Bill and Friends have their eyes on Dreamweaver more than Macromedia.
Don't know about the US press, but the reviews I've read over here in the UK regarding UltraDev (and subquently of Dreamweaver MX) are of the opinion that they are the tool for web development, and leave FrontPage in the dust.
In fact, one commentator over here, John Honeyball, writing in PC Pro, went as far as to say that Macromedia, with their MX products, put Microsoft's Visual Studio.NET to shame when it came to doing web development with IIS/ASP and
Of course, being in a position to 'persaude' ColdFusion shops to move to
-MT.
As only one person in this whole thread seems to have noted, this isn't about Flash plugins or Cold Fusion MX. It's about cutting off Apple's air supply. Just as Apple has been buying up a few pro video and music tool companies and discontinuing the Windows versions, this would be a means for discontinuing Mac versions of some of the killer apps that are run heavily on Macs. If you can't get Flash and Dreamweaver (and to a lesser extent, Fireworks, Director, Freehand and Fontographer) for the Mac, the Mac suddenly loses at least a third of its pro user base. Lose the web designers, and you also lose the people and companies that use Macs for that and other purposes. Once they have to move web people to PCs, they'll move the Photoshop/Illustrator people to PCs, too. Then the Quark people. Poof. Within two years, the only professional uses for Macs will be video production and some music.
Game over.
You beautiful soul! I wish it was that clean. ;- G! I! F!... Yup, GIF. At present, if you use GIF files, you are tresspassing on Unisys territory.
Unfortunately I have three letters that indicate that this is not the case. Here they are
But there is a more important reason to get REAL WORRIED by this tech.
Dreamweaver has become an equaliser of tech for serverside stuff.
Dreamweaver does coldfusion brilliantly;- No shit... It's macromedia tech. But it's the fact that Dreamweaver MX is probably the ONLY true PHP+MySQL aware+compliant wysiwig editor. This is not because of a minority share for said platform, but because adobe & MICROSOFT have other agendas.
If we lose dreamweaver, we lose the fact that a HUGE amount of mid-range content will not work with mozilla, and will not work with apache. If we lose dreamweaver, we lose yet another independant platform to microsoft.
And if we lose dreamweaver, we lose yet one more way that the average dumb-joe can escape microsoft.
Think about it, and then post ideas on how we can block this.
Anti-competition laws suggest that we can. It's up to US to figure HOW.
Let's do it.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I would have to think that this is mostly about Flash. Flash MX is a pretty amazing product now that it includes Flash Remoting.
.Net and J2EE.
.Net (and exclusion of Java) whould be a big win for .Net. Clearly Microsoft wants this for it's own, and wants to cut out Java.
Flash Remoting is what Java applets should have been - a thick client techonology that works. Using Flash Remoting it is possible to make calls to serverside software components directly over HTTP. It's quite extrodinary to be able to invoke a method on an a server object from inside a client side script and get back a cached result set from a database. Right now Flash Remoting supporte both
It's obvious that integration of this with
Hopefully the FTC will put the deep six on this - it's an extremely anti-competitive merger.
I think the most interesting angle on this speculative buy-out is video. Flash does video now. Flash is undoubtedly installed on more computers than any of the the big 3 video players: QT, Real, MS. (Flash video isn't very useful for users downloading stand-alone movies, but it's an excellent alternative to presenting embedded video - and there's no multiple player issues.)
For context, Mpeg4 is based on QT in some way; MS isn't playing along with the Mpeg4 standard (and seem to have their own proprietary version of Mpeg4 - you can now buy cameras with Mpeg4 stamped on them but the videos can only be played with WMP - nice standard). And the new Real player claims to play anything (Mpeg4, WMP, QT, Real) - except Flash. QT plays Flash (but not Flash video yet).
So Flash would look like a good sized stick for MS to beat QT, Mpeg4, and Real with.
(To say nothing of the database/server angle.)
You're the only person to notice this because this is not the reality of things.
If Microsoft wanted Apple dead they would've been dead several years ago. Don't you recall when Microsoft invested in Apple to keep ti alive? This was right around when the anti-trust lawsuits began. Basically Microsoft wanted to keep them around so that they (Microsoft) could claim that Apple was indeed a viable competitors and that they (Microsoft) were not a monopoly.
Taking a look at Apple now they are basically dead. They still have some dedicated designers but they're basically losing the educational sector. If anything this is a move against Java.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." - Martin Luther King, Jr.