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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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Wouldn't this merger give Adobe a near monopoly on many software products in the visual design field?
I for one wellcome our new massive software giant overlords...
Are they going to keep the Macromedia branding and just not compete with each other, or will we see Adobe Dreameaver?
And will the flash plugin have that terrible update software like Acrobat reader?
This is probably not good for anyone except Adobe, including us.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
SVG is Flash's biggest rival, but Adobe has always supported it. I hope this means there will be more open standards in Macromedia Flash.
Just great. Now all my reasonably-priced Macromedia products are going to be replaces with Adobe's expensive bloatware.
Macromedia has a generous upgrade policy and great educational discounts. Adobe charges out the yin-yang for their software ($1000 for CS, can only upgrade if you own the next most recent product.)
Macromedia's web design software was built expressly for web design: Fireworks and Dreamweaver. Adobe tacked a few tools onto Photoshop (which, by the way, does not deal well at ALL with vector art, not like Fireworks does). I don't know how well GoLive works - never used it. But I know that Dreamweaver has made great efforts to allow front-end developers to create standards-compliant XHTML.
If Adobe rolls Macromedia's great software into their own mediocre offerings, I may never upgrade again.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
No, this deal could mean the end of the multiverse as we know. Much of what was driving these two companies was their never ending battle to do the other one better. Many conventions, documentation, "classes" compared one company's product to another and if one company was lacking a feature the other had, they'd try to outdo it by a large margin.
Now, what silly patent/legal battle do we have to watch that occurs between two behemoths that basically were the entire industry.
I don't know how this is going to be good for Adobe in the long run. It smells a little like the HP/Compaq fiasco.
A few thoughts:
1. Many of the companies' offerings are substitution goods. Most web developers I know are shelling out for the MM Studio MX upgrades and the Adobe CS upgrades. That works out to about $1000 every year. I doubt one company will be able to squeeze us for as much in a single upgrade cycle. Especially when there's so much overlap (GoLive v. Dreamweaver, FreeHand v. Illustrator, Fireworks v. Photoshop & Illustrator, etc.)
2. Apple is going to have to be a little more careful about trying not to piss off Adobe by walking into their turf. Adobe has a bigger credible threat now in terms of ending Mac support.
3. This is going to make design shops hesitant to buy CS2 upgrades. I, for one, am more likely to wait for a suite that has the specific Macromedia apps I need for web development. That might mean waiting out this one upgrade cycle.
4. This does eliminate Adobe's fear that Microsoft would acquire Macromedia. That might be the only good reason for the buyout.
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
Uhm, what does Macromedia have to do with print/press? All of their product portfolio is aimed at online. Adobe has products both for traditional printing (InDesign, FrameMaker, Illustrator, etc.), purely online (Go Live), and products that straddle the two worlds (Acrobat). Macromedia is all about online.
Adobe's penetration into the online world sucks. Beyond Photoshop, most web designers I know use the Macromedia suite of products (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.) I don't think there is a real destruction of competition here. Adobe was strong in one area, Macromedia strong in another. It makes sense for Adobe to want to acquire Macromedia since they have basically reached market saturation in the markets they are in already. They have failed to compete in the newest online market for years. I don't think this is like Ford & GM wanting to merge. I think it's more like Chrystler and Mercedes Benz. The same market, to be sure, but they serve two distinct market segments. I don;t think there will be much regulatory scrutiny here.
That being said, I'm not happy about the merger. I've grown to loathe Adobe as a company, as I have seen them buy up products, then just milk them without putting in any major improvements (c.f. FrameMaker).
That small mewing sound you hear is Quark Inc. insisting that they are not dead yet.
Err, you seem to be forgetting Livemotion (the direct competitor to flash).
.png a much more common format, and is probably why so many web developers hate the lack of PNG support in IE6. Having never used ImageReady, I don't know how it compares.
That said, I hope Adobe does kill Freehand. It sucks hardcore. I hate it with a passion, and with good reason--it's UI hasn't been updated in a hideously long time, it is unusable, and probably the WORST of the MM products out there.
Fireworks is a different story--I think that it is one of the BEST products out there in terms of vector graphics and is a very usable, stable program. It is what made
The Dreamweaver vs. GoLive issue is difficult. I hate to say it, but in some ways it depends on whether you come from a graphic design & print background, or a coding/programming background. For those who come from a graphic design background, GoLive seems to be the product of choice, while Dreamweaver is more designed for those in coding. That said, I think most of my use for Dreamweaver is for site management and creating lots of very similar pages. Any more, though, I don't even do that--I use CSS, PHP & javascript to set up a single template and write the page based on current needs. This system is flexible, but I am getting OT. The real question is what will this mean for standards compliance in whatever product is resulting?
I hope that whatever happen isn't as bad as it could be, since the two powerhouses in web/graphic design just merged. Corel (as you say) is in trouble, but they haven't been a serious competitor in any respect.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
I agree completely, which is why I was so pleasantly surprised when I got my first Mac last fall. "Preview" (the universal file reader in OS X) is extremely fast and is well integrated with the OS. If a free, bundled app with a generic name can handle PDF files without locking up a computer, why can't Adobe do the same?
(Not trying to start a religious war here. I regularly use both platforms, with a healthy bit of Linux thrown in.)
XHTML and CSS that conform to W3C standards (which a visual editor can never create with (X)HTML as it is semantic).
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
Actually not really. Their legal squabbles over the past few years have ended up hurting consumers. Macromedia changed the Flash UI how many times? Furthermore both product lines are already so similar that is is expensive for small design houses to buy both.
Hopefully certain applications (Livemotion, GoLive, Freehand) will be deprecated for good after the merger and others will finally get a solid standardized interface (Flash), while others will be merged so consumers can get the best of both worlds (Photoshop, Fireworks).
I agree 100%. Photoshop and Fireworks are companion products if anything. Anything larger than web resolution and Fireworks chokes and dies a horrible death. And Photoshop couldnt output a sub 50k jpg that looks decent if its life depended on it.
I use fireworks for all my web output and it is far and beyond Adobe's answer (ImageReady). I really hope they just kill off Image Ready and integrate PS & FW closer together.
My sig can beat up your sig.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
I agree with you that flash loads too slow for general site navigation on the slower broadband connections, and most people aren't using flash to its potential, but I'll have to disagree with you that having the content producer controlling the layout of a site is a bad thing... it's just more crap the designer has to deal with in order to make a truly usable site, and most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
I've been developing for MCE2005 lately at work, and being able to have control of the layout really helps provide a better user environment. In my view, users should be able to just enjoy the experience as easily as television but that experience should be enhanced by the two-way communications provided by the Internet. However my opinion on this may be a little skewed from the rest of slashdot after developing websites meant for television for several months.