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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!
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 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.
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.
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?
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
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.
They could do it as a flick book
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
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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 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
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.
$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)
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]
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.
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... --
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.
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.
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.
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.