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Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4B
Kobayashi Maru writes "A press release from Adobe announces that they will buy Macromedia for approximately $3.4 billion. The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
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Coverage from CNET news.com.com, from Reuters.
Now, we're sure to see Flash get an improved user interface. I guess this is a case where Adobe's patent really helped it innovate.
It's nowhere near as powerful (yet), but try out Nvu. It's meant to be a Dreamweaver clone, and it's pretty decent.
From a we-can't-have-any-monopolies point of view, it is rather bad news. However, from a product suite POV, it's probably a good thing.
Look at it this way: Dreamweaver is considered to be about the best commercial HTML editor out there. And Flash is totally ubiquitous. However, Fireworks and Freehand are generally no-so-great (in comparison to Adobe's stuff). Photoshop and Illustrator are the de facto standards, and are great at what they do, yet Adobe's LiveMotion and GoLive are both pretty godawful.
Now that the two companies are one, you can be damn sure that you'll be able to get a package deal with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver all in one box, and they'll be as nicely integrated as Studio MX currently is. As someone who uses these on a regular basis, I'd consider that to be a pretty good thing.
Now, if only we could get Linux versions of these programs...
What happens to the Macromedia brand?
Adobe recognizes the strong equity of the Macromedia brand. That said, it makes great business sense for a company the size of the combined company to align behind a single corporate brand. Over time, Macromedia products will transition to the Adobe brand. Adobe expects to keep and continue investing in key Macromedia product brands.
Also of interest:
Do you expect to integrate the FlashPlayer and the Adobe Reader?
The complementary functionality of FlashPlayer and Adobe Reader will enable the deployment of a more robust cross-media, rich-client technology platform. The combined company will continue to be committed to the needs of both the FlashPlayer and Adobe Reader users.
Quark is still around, and they have a solid user base in the media industry, not to mention the GPL:ed page layout program Scribus, which is coming along nicely...
/cj
Adobe produces GoLive .. Macromedia produces Dreamweaver. These are in direct competition.
Adobe produces Illustrator .. Macromedia produces Freehand. These are in direct competition.
Adobe produces Photoshop .. Macromedia produces Fireworks. These aren't direct competitors exactly, but Adobe wants everyone who uses Fireworks now to use Photoshop instead, regardless of how much bloat Photoshop has today, or how clean its generated code is.
The problem is, I like Macromedia's products. I don't want to use Adobe's. If they axe Dreamweaver and Fireworks, I won't have a choice anymore. That is what they call "bad".
I'm not happy about this at all.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.
Adobe has really made inroads making their productivity line afforadble for production houses.
Instead of each title being $700 each or $300 upgrade, you get the suite for $1400 new or $800 upgrade. Not a bad deal at all for an average production house.
If a house can't afford that, they shouldn't be in business.
I know of plenty of freelancers that ponied up the $1400 for CS and are doing fine on their own.
Macromedia is the expensive one here. Let's hope they change this.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Try this, 'tis most excellent! Makes Reader load in 1/2 sec or so, terminates quickly, and hardly ever crashes. It seems it's all those damn stupid bloated plugins causing the problems. To fix:
1. Install Adobe Reader 6.0 and notice where it is installed.
2. Navigate to that folder in Explorer, locate the plug_ins subfolder and rename this folder to plug_ins_disabled.
3. Create a new plug_ins folder.
4. Move the files EWH32.api, printme.api and search.api from plug_ins_disabled to plug_ins.
Try it, you'll like it!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
I got tired of that program about six months ago and started using PDFReader. Renders accurately, MUCH more quickly, and starts up in about a second.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
If you have cash burning a hole in your pocket, get FontLab; otherwise, get FontForge.
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
Take everything from the plug_ins folder and move them to the "optional" folder.
You can still use any of them whenever you want, they just load on the fly.
Funny what happens when you read the docs that come with a program. My Adobe Reader 7.0 loads in well under 2 seconds on my 1.8Ghz.
So here's the deal, this merger will only increase the amount of software for stupid wanabe hacks out there chargin $200 to make a web page. Some unholy child will be born that will use sliced images for everything, a sea of poorly named styles and 200kb of javascript to print Hello World in a blue box. It will then try and sell you webhosting, ask you to upgrade, crash while doing it and forget how to load it's own template files.
I've been using DW since the very first beta, why? Frankly I started because I didn't know my right hand from my left and Javascript, or rather ECMA-262 was scarry and I didn't understand it and I thought CSS was bad and tables were the way to go. Tools like DW keep users in the dark making crap for people who deserve better.
Heres a clue kids, go download the GNU editor Crimson Editor and learn to write your own code. You'll be faster, more efficient and make better pages. Just give it time.
Crimson Editor is as good as the likes of EditPlus etc. Learn to make meanigful data to define your meaningful content.
According to the PDFReader download.com link:
Note: This download includes adware that may record your surfing habits, deliver advertisements, collect private information, or modify your system settings. Please pay close attention to the end user license agreement and installation options. For more information on adware and spyware, please visit our Spyware Center.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
And Photoshop couldnt output a sub 50k jpg that looks decent if its life depended on it.
Try using Save for Web... instead of Save.... Save for Web saves the file without all the metadata and the preview icon, which seriously cuts down on size. Here's an example that I did for Fark (safe for work), which looks halfway decent. 48k.
This is what worries me the most about this merger. Adobe obviously wants the web related products from Macromedia, but does not care about FreeHand at all.
Speaking from 8 years pre-press and printing industry knowledge here, I will say that FreeHand is the best 2 dimensional drawing application ever created. I was originally schooled using Illustrator, mainly because it came free with Photoshop, so the schools had a copy, and did not get to use FreeHand until I got my first job in prepress. In less than two weeks I converted. I can do everything in FreeHand that can be done in Illustrator, with one key difference. I can do it about 10 times faster in FreeHand.
User interface and tool behavior was designed right from the beginning in FreeHand to be efficient and intuitive. Illustrator is a hack of various thrown together features that loosely work together, in no apparent order, and with no continuity between them. Yes, I hate Illustrator. But don't get me wrong, I know how to use it inside and out. I was testing PDF and PostScript output from both of them for years and sending bug reports to Adobe regularly. I filed so many bug reports that I ended up being a go between for the Adobe developers and our development team.
I NEVER had to report a bug to Macromedia regarding output. Their PS and PDF were not always clean and streamlined, but in a print world, they were always accurate.
As much as it makes me cringe to say this (and anyone from the printing industry who has had to deal with Corel Draw would agree), but I do hope they sell FreeHand to Corel. At least somebody will be able to keep such a great peice of software alive.