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."

Comments

Not the end of the world

[IamTheRealMike]

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.

Re:Not the end of the world

[sg_oneill]

You beautiful soul! I wish it was that clean.
Unfortunately I have three letters that indicate that this is not the case. Here they are ;- G! I! F!... Yup, GIF. At present, if you use GIF files, you are tresspassing on Unisys territory.

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.

If Microsoft makes Flash proprietary...

[altgrr]

...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.

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 - .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?

Let's look back at history for a sec

[inteller]

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.

Who do you want to own today?

[curtisk]

Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering .NET.
furthering .NET? Has .NET even left the starting gate in all seriousness? Other than the msn portal.
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

Re:Who do you want to own today?

[Pope]

it just seems shitty when a big guy buys up a brand or name then tries to pawn it off as their own.

The way Macromind became Macromedia after they and Adobe split the Aldus software portfolio?

The way Macromedia bought Flash from Futuresplash?

Ask yourself whatever happened to Extreme 3D, SoundEdit and Xres...

Folks this is a rumor

[ces]

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.

In Other News. . .

[snitty]

. . . Microsoft plans to aquire the DOJ.

Re:uh oh

[rknop]

Does anyone else think that if this happened it would be the absolute worst thing that ever happened to the web?

No. A bunch of worse possibilities immediately leap to mind:

• The September that never ended
• Graphical mail clients with proportional fonts
• HTML E-mail
• the "blink" tag
• Web-based forums overtaking NNTP
• "WYSIWYG" (a complete misunderstanding of the web) page makers which write awful, awful, bloated code
• Telecom monopolies on the "last mile"

...but most of all....

• The introduction of Flash in the first place!

-Rob

Re:Don't only focus on the negative!!

[b_pretender]

now, microsoft's "save as html" feature in word, excel, etc definately produces some cryptic, overly bloated, and nearly unusable html..
</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">

It's about killing Apple

[hatless]

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.