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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.
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!
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.