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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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Woho! Saviour of the Universe
Now we'll never see DreamWeaver on Linux.
What does it mean when the two most instrusive web browser plugin makers merge?
Coverage from CNET news.com.com, from Reuters.
Well, if any of you are irritated by Flash, this move should reduce the number of folks using it. It'll be too bloated to load within a release or two.
What'dya mean there's no BLINK tag!?
April fools is long over!
If this is not a joke, then we'll finally get good support for exporting Illustrator files to Flash!!
Wouldn't this merger give Adobe a near monopoly on many software products in the visual design field?
Flash will stick around for sure, but what will happen to Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Freehand? Adobe may go with straight market share and keep Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator as the pro tools, and push GoLive, Fireworks and Freehand as the consumer versions, or they may drop them all together. I can't imagine many buyers interested in picking up the fight against the Adobe juggernaut.
From an Inkscape developer:
I think it's good news for us. There will be people scared or disgusted by the forming monopoly and looking for alternatives. Also, it seems likely that Freehand will be either discontinued or at least downplayed so as to not hurt Illustrator, which means a lot of users will have to migrate. All this gives us a certain opportunity.
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.
Bad news?? We might actually see a standards compliant plug-in out of this that actually has a good development environment to go along with it. Adobe certainly will be inserting their SVG magic into the Macromedia environment. Plus think of all the integration possibilities with Adobe/Macromedia products.
I personally think this is at LEAST *promising* news!
Who gets Freehand this time?
echo 33676832766569823265328479713269.8639857989Pq | dc
PDF is an evolution of Postscript. It's strength lies (IMHO) in being able to render to paper exactly what you see on the screen. How would 'movie' files be translated to paper?
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
There is no 3rd.
Would competition regulators look to block this merger??
If Ford wanted to merge with General Motors, there would be serious investigations. Oracle needed to show there was competition from SAP & JD Edwards before it was allowed to acquire Peoplesoft.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
I keep wondering what's going to happen to Freehand. Adobe bought the original marketers of Freehand (Aldus, also the guys who made PageMaker) back in the day. Now they're buying the makers of FreeHand AGAIN.
-mkb
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.
As most designers will hopefully agree, Adobe's software is stable, well designed, consistent in operation and relatively intuitive. However, their web offerings are limited. On the other hand, Macromedia's web centric software is unstable, (IMHO) appallingly designed, inconsistent and very hard to learn. So, now Adobe and Macromedia are one, hopefully they can combine the pluses of their cultures and products to the benefit of frustrated designers & developers everywhere.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Why? Because 2 big corps merge it's evil? Since Macromedia seemed to be Adobes Photoshops main competitor and Fireworks, I'd bet that they are basically buying out the competition. It can only mean good things if you are an advocate of FOSS applications like Gimp. If you are desperately waiting for Dreamweaver on Linux, then there is something seriously wrong with you! I'll be glad to see it slowly die when Adobe stiffles Macromedia products in favour of Photoshop.
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.
The impact of Flash on the web, however, has been unforgivably negative, in my opinion. I boycott companies who require flash to view their web sites, there's no reason to ever need it for most web sites out there. I'm kind old school I guess, I think of the web as being primarily a form of information and knowledge distribution, and flash isn't necessary to present most types of information or knowledge.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
This will probably mean:
- Adobe will kill off Freehand, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks, and incorporate any good features from them into Illustrator, GoLive, and ImageReady, respectively.
- Photoshop and Flash will remain the same, since neither had competition from the other company.
- They'll probably maintain 'lite' versions of all of the above, giving consumers the illusion of choice.
- Corel will acquire the company that makes Preparation H, since their asses will hurt so much from shitting a few tons of bricks.
This is my signature. soid st egr.hyTa rsiugm usnin Any questions?
Adobedriva.
This makes good sense from both companies' perspective and this is clearly signalled in the fact that it comes with the blessing of both boards. Adobe has traditionally been strong in the offline graphical design business particularly with respect to desktop publishing in the newspaper and magazine publishing world. The company has also made its PDF reader ubiquitous in the desktop space and has a strong enterprise play.
Macromedia, on the other hand, has a much stronger presence in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the desktop with its Dreamweaver and Flash product set. Both companies have made plays into the wireless market with the promise of rich media applications and cross platform access.
Macromedia, however has made stronger inroads into this market with recent deals with key operators and device manufacturers that will see Flash expanding its reach from the desktop environment to wireless platforms.
The deal itself is not without issues from a competition standpoint since the resulting business will almost certainly hold a sizeable chunk of the GUI market that would make it difficult for some smaller vendors to play in. The companies have overlapping product sets and a product portfolio that goes in many different directions. That is both a positive and a negative and will need to be addressed, going forward.
Iran captures three CIA agents
PDF is also the imaging technology underlying Quartz, the display subsystem used on Mac OS X.
At this point, where will the commercial support for SVG go? Now that adobe has the defacto vector drawing platform for the web I fear that their support for the SVG format will go the way of the dodo.
So far, the market seems to think Adobe is paying too much. They were paying a 33% premium when the deal was announced. ADBE is down over 11% so far today. MACR is up slightly.
One can only hope that this will increase the viability of open souce design and display technologies (GIMP, etc).
It will also be interesting to see what they do with ColdFusion, which while it had floundered for the first couple of years under MACR, had recently come out with some pretty impressive capabilities.
They could do it as a flick book
while most seem to prefer photoshop, I can get something up and running for the web much more quickly with Fireworks than I can with any Adobe product.
I pulled a jack move to cop this sig
>How would 'movie' files be translated to paper?
;-)
I take you haven't seen Minority Report yet?
---- Take the Space Quiz!
ColdFusion is a great web technology thats usually underrated by web developers. I hope Adobe continues to develop it. I prefer it over other languages such as PHP, ASP, etc. With the MX version, you can actually write java code and call the methods directly from ColdFusion. It would be a shame if it ends.
The calculation I keep running over in my mind is:
Adobe PDF + Macromedia Flash = Annimated PDFs
Somehow I think Bill Gates is behind all this
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
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.
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...
I saw a demo where Jaguar had embedded a user-controlled VR of the inside of their latest model in a pdf. Even though the image looked like a picture in the PDF, there were buttons to pan and zoom the view so you could get a 360 view of the interior.
PDF (like HTML) has long strayed from its original purpose into uncharted territory. This is not (IMO) a Good Thing
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You've been able to embed Flash into PDFs since at least version 6.
You just forgot the largest prist/press media company: Quark.
However... they won't stay at no.1 for long.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
What I want to know is what is going to happen to folks like us who bought multiple licenses of the huge expensive Macromedia all-in-one package of software, with the intent of taking advantage of the upgrade pricing for years to come. Is my investment totally down the drain?
And what about all those websites on Cold Fusion. Those folks
are seriously out of luck. (We don't use it though, thankfully)
They're the third... maybe behind by leaps and bounds, but there you have it.
They have a Photoshop alternative of themselves, they have Paintshop Pro as the el-cheapo alternative, they've got Painter, they've got technical drawing, vector drawing, etc. etc.
They even have Wordperfect (*chuckle*) - more importantly, the suite.
That said.. Adobe/Macromedia merger is still sort of scary.
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.
"...The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
Who else is holding out for Macrodobia?
AT&ROFLMAO
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
Fireworks certainly wasn't meant to compete with Photoshop when it comes to all the features and supported files, but there's one thing it can do that beats the pants out of Adobe's stuff is image export for the web. Image Ready just plain sucks in comparison... and don't get me started on usability, Photoshop is stuck 5 years behind Macrodedia when it comes to palette layouts, ...
Don't Tell Me What I Can't Do!
And everybody just loooooves waiting on Acrobat to load in order to view a freaking calendar or memo.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
Other tools are also in trouble...
:-(
Macromedia just bought eHelp (makers of RoboHelp), and we were expecting a long update cycle as MM digested eHelp. The bright side was the possibility that MM would make a DreamWeaver-based help product.
Now we're probably doomed to a longer wait and possible integration with Adobe's poorly though out Web tools.
I expect DreamWeaver and other tools to see something similar to the FrameMaker situation:
1) Buy the tool
2) Learn from it
3) Deprecate it in favor of a lesser tool (InDesign in the case of Frame)
4) Proft!
Sigh
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
PDF != Adobe. The implication in many historical documents concerning OS X is that PDF was chosen as the basis for Quartz precisely because it was an open, royalty-free format, unlike Display PostScript (which powered OS X's predecessor, NextStep - or NeXTStep, or ... nevermind).
I do all kinds of PDF work (viewing, generating) and have not a single Adobe application on my system.
I don't care about fireworks, flash, whatever. BUT if they kill off Dreamweaver, I will have a major vendetta with Adobe!
This is honestly one of the worst things that can be imagined for most of us in the web world. The reality being that web development products will suddenly be submerged in a see of pure WYSIWYG. While I've been looking forward to seeing what features are going to be in GoLive CS2, I'm not too optimistic.
I don't know how many other people feel like this, but it does seem that we're heading back to the days of developer and designer being in completely different realms, and where the graphic designer thinks he or she can do whatever as long as they see it beautifully.
At least there's still GIMP and NVU, right? Maybe they'll get a lot more support once Adobe jacks up all the prices again.
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
I would pose the same question to the M$-Word developers...
They should call it Macadamia! Just a nutty suggestion..
I've counted a few dozen "this is bad" comments. How would everyone feel, at this point, if someone with pockets as deep as MS's were to launch a (real) initiative in this area? Maybe, buying up Corel, and fattening it up to compete? Suddenly, Bill would look, well, just swell. Unless (and this is very unlikely, of course) there were any hypocritical leanings here on slashdot, I'd assume we'd be rooting for a new underdog in a suddenly completely consolidated industry.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I tried to get the press release from Adobe, but their site seems to be /.'ed. The text below is from Macromedia's Site
--
ADOBE TO ACQUIRE MACROMEDIA
Combined Company to Deliver Industry-Defining Technology Platform for Rich, Interactive Content
SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 18, 2005 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.
The combination of Adobe and Macromedia will provide customers a more powerful set of solutions for creating, managing and delivering compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media. Together, the two companies will meet a wider set of customer needs and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets, particularly in the mobile and enterprise segments.
"Customers are calling for integrated software solutions that enable them to create, manage and deliver a wide range of compelling content and applications - from documents and images to audio and video," said Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe. "By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software - along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform."
Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe's and Macromedia's closing prices on Friday, April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock. Upon the close of the transaction, Macromedia stockholders will own approximately 18 percent of the combined company on a pro forma basis.
In the combined company, Chizen will continue as chief executive officer and Shantanu Narayen will remain president and chief operating officer. Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia, will join Adobe as president of worldwide field operations. Murray Demo will remain executive vice president and chief financial officer. Dr. John Warnock and Dr. Charles Geschke will remain as co-chairmen of the Board of Directors of the combined company and Rob Burgess, chairman of the Macromedia Board of Directors, will join the Adobe Board.
"Both Macromedia and Adobe are passionate about creating and enabling great experiences across a wide range of devices and operating systems," said Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia. "Our combined teams will be a powerful force for innovation around cutting-edge platforms for delivering content and applications."
Integration
The two companies are developing integration plans that build on the cultural similarities and the best business and product development practices from each company. The companies will make additional details and information about the acquisition available at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia.html.
"While we anticipate the integration team will identify opportunities for cost savings by the time the acquisition closes, the primary motivation for the two companies' joining is to continue to expand and grow our business into new markets," said Chizen.
The acquisition, which is expected to close in Fall 2005, is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by the stockholders of both companies and regulatory approvals. The transaction will be accounted for under purchase accounting rules.
Due to the absence at this time of estimates of the acquisition-related restructuring costs and the allocation of the purchase price between goodwill, in-process R&D, other in
nicely summed up there. now, which way will adobe lean towards? they might probably come with a better range of packages that suit each profile of users - they already have done that. photoshop, flash and dreamweaver would be a web studio, maybe the other range would be for graphics works for the print studio(they can play around more than adobe's own golive and livemotion). there's also some talks abt adobe not favouring linux. well, i see it this way. recent MS talks about browser being obsolete in longhorn might have blown the fuse at macromedia and adobe - and adobe relies on thier acrobat heavily too. its safer for them to invest in linux in the longer run. only problem with linux is the proliferation of desktops, when they see the numbers, they will come in.
You've obviously not tried Dreamweaver MX 2004 and set a document to XHTML mode then - it does all styling in CSS. What more could you want?
$3.4B and can't survive a slashdotting?
somebody needs to invest in some hobby boxes...
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
A PDF reader for Windows that doesn't suck.
I use it with firefox. You click a pdf link. Foxit opens. It displays the PDF. It doesn't mess up your system. It runs quickly. It feels much more like reading a PDF on OS X or Linux, which is nice.
Bloat hasn't caused people to run screaming from ColdFusion, which eats up RAM like a flesh-eating virus on steroids...
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
I see comments that Adobe apps are (supposedly) stable. Since when? I've had to try twelve straight times and do some massive registry editing and uninstallation of codecs to get Premiere just to install, and another five days of further fiddling to get it to start correctly, and even then, I could still go for a bike ride around my entire county and come back before it did finally finish loading.
It looks to me like Adobe is competing with Microsoft for needlessly bloated code.
Macromedia apps on the other hand install right the first time and start correctly, but never seem to do anything that I want them to do, that the docs explicitly state they should do.
So now we get apps that won't install correctly, won't start in a reasonable amount of time when you do finally shoe-horn them in, and then won't do what they are supposed to? This is like the graphic design equivalent of Windows 95 first release.
I second, third, fourth, etc. the question on the wisdom of allowing the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging without a viable #3 and #4 fast behind to become the new #2 and #3. Are we to expect Corel to pull a miracle out of their nether regions to compete? Will we b*tch and moan if MS steps to the plate with offerings that it bundles with Windows?
Sorry, but as a tech with some scruples I gotta say we shouldn't be letting the creation of a new Microsoft of the graphics world get going: a behemoth company that puts out stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't care but you don't have much of a choice because you're already joined at the hip and reliant upon their stuff for your daily business.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Personally I've always enjoyed FH more than Illustrator. Freehand's colour panel and drawing tools puts Illustrators to shame, absolute shame. The only things I want to see in FH from Illustrator is the better layer management, the very sexy mesh gradient and the better custom strokes.
my utility belt tells me its to the bar batman
Actually it seems like a good idea to me. Macromedia makes decent software but they've always annoyed the crap out of me by constantly doing one thing:
They always re-design their interfaces from one version to another. The interface in their software is NEVER constant from one version to another. Every time you upgrade to a newer version, you have to re-learn the damn thing from scratch.
I used to be really good at Flash back when it was something like 1.0, then they redid the interface and all my know-how was gone. I had to learn how to ride a bicycle from scratch.
Now, I don't mean they just move some menus around and change buttons. They TOTALLY redesign it! Completely! Functions are different, layouts are different, buttons are COMPLETELY different. It's like a completely new program.
The required car-metaphor would be that you're a mechanic used to working on diesel-engines, and when Car Inc. releases the new models they've replaced the engine with UFO-parts.
So to summarize my ranting, maybe Adobe can mainatin the UI from one version to the next? I hope so.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Adobe might go the other way and purely push Flash. I'm sure Adobe has been dying to own the Flash market.
In fact, Adobe might have bought Macromedia just for Flash. Flash for the desktop (Flex) and Flash for mobiles (Flash Lite) are the areas of big potential. The rest of Macromedia's apps -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and the rest -- they're in a very mature and saturated market, as Adobe knows so well.
Well, if any of you are irritated by Flash, this move should reduce the number of folks using it. It'll be too bloated to load within a release or two.
I hope you are right. In my mind, Flash represents the triumph of the content creator over the user of the internet. HTML, in its original incarnation as a markup language, gave power to the browser - the user of the browser controlled how tagged text was rendered, the user controlled the pacing of pages, etc. Lightweight HTML pages loaded quickly and let the user actively move in a self-paced fashion. WIth HTML, the user could actively control what they saw, how they saw it, and when they saw it.
Flash takes to much of that control away -- the content creator forces their vision of layout, type size, and pacing on the hapless, passive viewer. I have seen so many flash sites that turn a broadband connection into a 110 baud experience of slowly appearing words (get a clue, I don't want to see letters swirling on a page, fading in and out, etc.). Flash prevents browsing. You cannot glance at a flash site, you cannot control what you see or when you see it. You are forced to wait for it to download and wait for it to play. Although I admit that a few, too few, flash sites add substantive value with interactivity, it is far to little to compensate for the incredibly frustrating body of flash on the web today.
We can only hope that Abode screws this one up so that the browser of the internet can enjoy more control and escape user-interface micromanagement by flash content creators.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm currently in a subsequent large scale Flash / ActionScript project. Flash MX 2004 Pro sucks as IDE but the Flash Plattform and Technology totally rocks. This stuff has made my living for the last 14 months. I so very much pray to god they don't screw this up. ... :-)
... So this is the kind of stuff you're actually spared from when you go OSS only.
But then again, if they do and some people push XUL or Blender, there will be room again for the fast, small and agile oss cracks. That would save me the bianual upgrade costs.
I so very much hope the ActionScript 2 Team stays in charge. Those are the only ones capable at programming over at MM. Seriously.
And I hope that they don't fuck up the Player. And don't make a must-have compiler with a crappy IDE (as MM did) and just double the pricing.
My gosh, listen to me.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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 certainly will be inserting their SVG magic into the Macromedia environment. "
What, exactly, makes you so sure? You got a portal to the future you're not telling us about?
Adobe *loves* the idea of lock-in. Remember, this is the company that had someone *arrested* for reverse-engineering Adobe's eBook format just so people could view and make backups of their files. (See http://www.freesklyarov.org/ for details.)
So given the choice between something like SVG, which Adobe doesn't totally control, and Flash, which (assuming this goes through) Adobe will own, lock, stock, and barrel, I strongly suspect they will go for the latter.
Money follows the path of least resistance.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've seen dreamweaver using CSS, and it usually goes "style1, style2,.." etc. and not a single style re-used.
This is hardly better than using the FONT tag. You'd have to set the style manually to make it work as intended. I guess you can do that in Dreamweaver too, but most Dreamweaver "experts" don't seem to care.
Maybe my attitude towards Dreamweaver and Photoshop would be best described by the ad slogan: "The right tools to get the job done even if you have no clue".
There is irony in that line, but I guess most people whose identity is defined by being an Photoshop/Dreamweaver expert will probably miss it.
I'm sorry, I should have shut up, but I think Adobe and Dreamweaver make a good match.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Maybe we'll finally see an OS X update for Fontographer - admittedly a niche product, but one I still have need of once in a blue moon.
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... --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There are plenty of good programs out there that make .swf's, Adobe even had one for a while. But the reason the Open Source community rallies behind .PDF and not .SWF is that unlike .PDF there are no good open source programs to make .SWF's
Introducing Microsoft Vacuum 1.0 The first Microsoft product that doesn't suck.
Just want to point out that Adobe stopped developing LiveMotion. It never made it into the CS family, and they don't mention it in their lineup.
I suspect Fireworks will replace/merge with ImageReady, as Adobe never really managed to turn it into a successful standalone. ImageReady had the better imaging, but Fireworks had the better editing tools. If we're lucky we may keep the Fireworks tools and get the picture quality of ImageReady.
Dreamweaver and GoLive are so different in programming, but my hope is that we get Dreamweaver's coding/layout GoLive's site management tools. I just hope they maintain Dreamweaver's codebase, as I loved their plugin architecture.
Director may actually see a revival, but I suspect that Director may end up like PageMaker: a tool that the users refuse to let die, so Adobe will stilll half-heartedly develop it further.
Poor Freehand. It used to be my favorite software. I wrote letters with it, made all sorts of illustrations and multipage layouts. A huge amount of my docs and illustrations are in FH8/FH9/FH11 format. Will another company come and "rescue" Freehand again? I doubt it: instead we may see some FreeHand tools integrated intro Illustrator (but not the multipage: Adobe's philosophy doesn't accomidate that).
Ever thought that they might make one product that would take the best of both competing products? Even if they decided to axe one, there's no reason they wouldn't do that. This is all premature anyways.
http://hughgordon.com/
The other guy put valid points forward.
You respond to none.
Toughtful argumentation is not bashing.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
I hope Homesite does not die :(
***Weeps***
sex is better than war!
Flash, Contribute, ColdFusion are the reasons Adobe is buying Macormedia. ColdFusion is, amazingly, still selling because it has a very good IDE and makes web app development easier.
The other stuff is going to get canned in some way or another. Adobe will NOT develop Dreamweaver and GoLive concurrently. It makes no sense financially (two development teams who have to be paid) and it makes no sense competition wise. They might take over some of Dreamweaver's server side stuff (asp, php, jsp, cfm etc), but I can't see them keeping both.
Director is something I'm worried about. They might keep it, as it has its own niche market (Computer Based Teaching, interactive DVDs etc), but Adobe is nothing if not hyperefficient financially (anyone remember LiveMotion, PageMill, Style etc?) and they usually kill products that aren't major sellers.
Freehand is as good as dead. Period. And, given how Illustrator has become such as huge bloat app, that is a real pity.
I can see Adobe taking most of the web development features from Fireworks (easy drop down menus etc) adding them to Image Ready, and canning Fireworks.
Flash will almost certainly get the Adobe Workover(TM), which means a shiny new interface. Given how bad Flash's interface is, this might actually be a good thing. I actually hope they'll integrate some of Livemotion's interface in there, such as After Effect style timelines and easy paths. This might be the best result of the whole buy out.
Apple could not have bought Macromedia, for the simple reason that Adobe would have done its monopoly abuse act once again, and threatened to drop Photoshop, Illustrator and Golive for the Mac, like they did with Premier. I'm pretty sure Apple could have developed very powerful apps out of Macromedia's stuff, but the Adobe apps are industry standard, sadly. which would have meant a hefty kick in the soft parts for Apple's marketshare.
In fact, the only company that has both the resources and marketshare to compete with Adobe these days, is Microsoft. If Microsoft really wants, they could develop their own creative applications, bundle and sell them at low low prices, and kill Adobe.
In fact, as much as I dislike Microsoft, I would like to see this happen.
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.
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.
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
You make a good point -- perhaps you and I don't disagree as much as it might seem. Some author-control of layout is not a bad thing. A consistent site page design certainly aids navigation, comprehension, and usage. What I would like is more control of type size (new versions of HTML suffer from this too) because some designers choose excessively small or excessive large type. I'd also like more control of color because too many designers make bad decisions (e.g.,. yellow text on white backgroud, non-standard colors for HREFs, etc.).
most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
This is the heart of the problem with Flash today. The technology itself is not evil, but too many of its developers are just bad and they ruin it for the better developers that do do a good job with Flash. Perhaps if Flash had a certification program or some scheme for regulating who used it, it would be better. In architecture, you have to have license to practice and perhaps Flash needs that too.
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.
This is where you and I part company. I absolutely don't want a TV-like experience -- this is my biggest reason for Flash-hatred. I prefer interaction, manipulation, and navigation. I want a self-paced, not a author-paced experience. I want to be able to randomly access the parts of the site I'm interested in. I want to spend as much or a little time dwelling on any given part of the site as I choose. I want to be able to navigate back and forth over the content. I want to be able to copy-paste snippets of text (I use the web for research). Too many Flash site take that control away from me and I don't like it.
If the fraction of bad Flash dropped, I would gladly become a fanboy. But until Flash developers realize that some people don't want a passive, linear, author-controlled experience, there will be too much bad Flash and too much knee-jerk hatred of what could be an awesome technology for interactive sites.
Thanks for writing an insightful counterargument.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I'm quite happy about this. The reliability of Macromedia products, Flash specifically, on Mac OSX has been horrible. Adobe products on Mac OSX have in general been reliable. Hopefully Adobe will kick Macromedia's programmers in the buttocks so that things like save dialog boxes being covered by greyed out panels like the actions panel won't happen any more. That's actually a small annoyance compared to Flash crashing half of the time when I click and drag my cursor, or the timeline problems that force me to open the file on my pc for certain operations. I love macromedia, but macromedia, she no love the Macintosh!
This blows. As my fellow prepress and publishing professionals know, Adobe has begun to act more and more hostilely toward the Macintosh platform. An important VP there -- brought over from Microsoft, no less -- has repeatedly spread ridiculous anti-Mac FUD, in everything from press releases to book reviews, and Adobe's development for OS X has been dreadful -- still nothing, except for the very latest version of Acrobat, is Cocoa, and Adobe has insisted that Photoshop will not take advantage of OS X's best graphics-performance features.
In all this, some of us had hoped Macromedia would, eventually, save the day. Of course, they have a very long way to go to offer a professional replacement for Adobe products, especially Photoshop, but we still entertained some hope. And, as previous posters have pointed out, at least there was healthy competition.
DTP and prepress are huge consumers of the Mac -- one may go so far to say that they are what has kept Apple afloat through bad and good times. Now what? If Adobe continues to push Windows, DTP and prepress may be forced to make that odious switch, and Apple may be jeopardized. Let's devoutly hope my predictions don't prove true.
Sadly, this isn't going to do anything to fix the proliferation of idiotic version "numbers", as both companies have fallen off the deep end with inscrutible nonsense like "CS 2" and "MX 04".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
What's so funny about Corel. I prefer CorelDRAW to Illustrator any day of the week.
BTW, you guys should check out the new Xara X1. Xara is independent from Corel again, and their vector program is truly unique. It doesn't have the feature bloat that CorelDRAW & Illustrator have, and it can make some stunning graphics. Definitely not a replacement, but a great addition.
Dom
I would really like to see an Authorware runtime for Linux. I never thought it would happen from Macromedia, but perhaps under this deal part of their "new markets" will include Linux. As has been noted, things are interesting with Reader 7.0 and it is a trend in the industry.
While somewhat tangentially related, it's worth noting that National Instruments finally came out with a Linux version of LabView. I see Authorware and Labview as cousins of sorts. It would be great if they were completely open source, but seeing them at least available for Linux is a great step.
When Adobe acquired Aldus in 1994, it was forced to spin off Freehand. At the time the two companies, together with Quark, were the dominant players in the desktop publishing software industry. Freehand was Illustrator's only real competitor on the Mac, and desktop publishing was almost exclusively the domain of the Macintosh, sans FrameMaker on a SGI workstation.
After the acquisition, Adobe was forced to spin off Freehand for anti trust reasons. Macromedia was formed from the combined products of Macromind Director and Aldus Freehand.
Now Adobe is acquiring freehand for the second time. My guess is that Adobe does not really want Freehand and will gladly sell it off. Dreamweaver is the best application Macromedia has, and Adobe wants it as well as Flash. Fireworks is pretty good; Coldfusion and Director are dying.
If Adobe wants to keep Dreamweaver, maybe Adobe can strike a deal to sell off GoLive instead? I am sure they will prefer Dreamweaver over GoLive mainly because of its market share.
The question remains, who will to form a company based on Freehand and GoLive?
Is this what all those 'futurists' were talking about when they said there'd be a 'digital convergence'?
I don't disagree with the original poster that competition did drive these two to one-up each other's features, but you're right(er) on the essentials: Adobe has continued to be the traditional publishing giant, and Macromedia has had the Web world edge. They've been in slightly different markets, and to some extent their competition has injured the consumer in unnecessary ways.
For another non-trivial example of the way their competition has sometimes stung us, take a look at how Fireworks has, and hasn't, and then has been able to use various PhotoShop filters. The upgrade path for Fireworks has been affected by this, for me. I don't want to upgrade my software only to lose a bunch of third-party filters that suddenly won't work in the new version. Caused by Adobe and Macromedia sparring it out, pure and simple.
That said, I'll believe Adobe can rationalize the overlapping product lines when I see it. They can't be stupid enough to kill off the Dreamweaver line in favor of a GoLive, for Gawd's sake, but it wouldn't amaze me if they kept trying to fold in Fireworks' html-exporting features and wound up confusing PS for no real gain.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus
Is anyone else thrilled to hear Macromedia has been taken over! And now they'll get the same happy treatment they doled out in years past to companies they acquired.
Macromedia hired a ton of people right out of college, with zero experience, promoted the most obsequious/self-serving, and you know the rest of the story. 26 year-olds with no industry experience running the show, promoting their friends, etc. It was a very disfunctional company, with some really talented people who somehow survived in the chaos. Hope the creepiest ones get cut first.
good luck, Adobe, you have some major prima donnas coming your way.
They advertised that Acrobat files can be read on "any platform" when all they offered was Mac and Losedows versions, even when there were quite a few operating systems out there, especially Linux, with millions of users at the time, that could have used Acrobat, and people were begging and pleading with them to support those operating systems, even at a cost.
They incorporated software into Photoshop CS to thwart the forgery of money, just to prove that they believe their customers are low-life criminals. Not that this necessarily inconveniences any legitimate user, except for the extra unnecessary processing overhead, but it shows what they think of their customers.
I don't like Adobe. Luckily, I am the one who specifies hardware and software purchases for our company. I buy software from Adobe's competition. The first item above, Mr. Sklyarov's arrest, is the primary reason that I do so, but the second and third items only show that Adobe thinks their customers are stupid (the "any platform" thing) and criminals (the money thing). Too bad. They could have been a first-class company.
Good point.
I think however that having Linux/Mac OS X solutions will be a key strength of the new mega-Adobe. Hell will freeze over before Microsoft ships Linux software, but Linux compatibility and cross-platform deployment in general is becoming more and more a requirement of those seeking an alternative to the Windows monoculture.
If Adobe supports multiple platforms, it should give its products a significant edge in the market.
Adobe and Macromedia really, really like to sue eachother for patent infringment. One will sue, the other will countersue, and this seems to happen at least once every year. The merger will probably pay for itself by the end of the decade because the companies wont have to employ an army of lawyers with a larger population than North Dakota.