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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
...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.
... 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.
Yes they are innovative! They created the web browser...er...they created that really neat program Visio...er...they created the office suite...er...they created the GUI...er...
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Bite Me Fanboy!!
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!
it's called hostile takeover and it's done all the time.
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 $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
I hate to think what Microsoft acquiring Macromedia would mean for webstandards. Dreamweaver by Macromedia is certainly one of the most popular WYSIWYG HTML editors around, and because of that there has been groups such as the WaSP have been work with Macromedia making sure it is complies with the web standards out there. Who knows what Microsoft would do with Dreamweaver seeing that is in direct competition with Frontpage.
aus.music.scrapbook
"Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which - through Macromedia's changes this year - took a step closer to J2EE."
Huh? Excuse me? Flash is anywhere *near* J2EE? Last I looked, Flash is entirely orthogonol to J2EE. It is just a media/presentation layer. That's like saying HTML or SMIL just took a step closer to J2EE. Nonsense.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I wonder if (this report is in fact true) this will add fuel to the WV and MA appeal to the settlement? Can those states use post-judgement behavior to show that the settlement is ineffective and that M$ 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.
. . . Microsoft plans to aquire the DOJ.
Modular Redundancy--Because 4 out of 5 Nodes agree
However, Mozilla has much better (potentially in some future) vector presentation technology: SVG. It's better integrated to HTML/Javascript code around it. And it's really platform independent.
I think that the day Microsoft buys Macromedia, Flash will dye for Mozilla and many Mozilla developers will switch to SVG. Which is much better than Flash.
Less is more !
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
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
If this does turn out to be more than the regular rumour-mongering, it's worth remembering that even if a merger isn't blocked by US authorities, the European Union Competition Commission has shown itself more than willing to block deals like this that are so obviously anti-competitive. And yes, they do have jurisidiction over the deal, because both companies do business and have subsidiaries in Europe.
</i><img src="pix.gif" width="1" height="1"></p style="messy">
<content type="MSWord" created="Microsft" data="useless"><include stylesheet="useless_bloated.css">What are you talking about? MS Word's save is <h1><'/h1>HTML is how I learned to write webpages. </p style="mozilla_noncompliant">
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
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.
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
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.
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