Slashdot Mirror
Why Did Adobe Buy Macromedia?
option8 writes "According to John Dvorak the reasoning behind Adobe's recent (and to many, surprising) purchase of Macromedia for $3.4 billion is that Adobe was afraid Microsoft was going to do it first. An interesting look at the thinking and attitude of Adobe from someone who's been following them for a long time. From TFA: "So, mostly out of fear, Adobe buys its main competitor and now must shoehorn the company into its unfortunate not-invented-here corporate culture. (This aspect of Adobe is another story in itself.)""
Like the article said, Adobe was simply acting out of fear, uncetainty and doubt. Microsoft already has a competent flagship MS Paint, it doesn't need anything else.
And what about Gimp? Is it really not a threat to Adobe at all?
It'll be fun to watch if Microsoft hinted that it's looking at forking Gimp, Adobe will go nuts about that!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Can Flash and PDF kill the web. Muahahahahahahaha.
Buying everything in sight instead of innovating seems so popular these days...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
To the tune of Yankee Doodle:
We bought a company out of fear and called in Macradobe!
I know that somebody can figure out more lyrics on this. It is 4/20 after all.
That does seem to be what Adobe is doing to its full product line lately, adding all kinds of DRM. Hmm.
If Microsoft really want's Macromedia, they'll probably be more then happy to by Adobe, who bought Macromedia.
Microsoft has enough monopoly issues of its own to worry about without buying the company that makes Flash.
The author makes a number of assertions without justifying them.
Next
Iran captures three CIA agents
Adobe is going to try to corner the image market and then Google will buy them =-)
This is just the software business maturing. There are no great expectations for this marriage, its just a strong player with a strong stock using it as currency to remove a competitor.
Sure it was purchased on FUD but it's a very valid fear. It's not like they aren't getting anything out of the deal.
As much as I hate Adobe having a Monopoly, I'm not sure I'd like it more if they shared the market with Microsoft only to go the way of Corel in a few years.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Microsoft could end up buying Adobe in the end if this merger doesn't work out as intended and profits/revenue fall because of management problems.
John Dvorak may be more of a journalist than say Rob Enderle or Laura Didio, but the guy is a nutter. Have a look at his comments on the current iMac: "The design is hardly inspirational. In fact, if you put two headlamps on it and a metal sun visor over its "windshield," it would be reminiscent of a 1954 DeSoto." Or perhaps his opinion that Linux would die as soon as MS released a distro http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1759,1768170,00.as p
I would trust a random guy on slashdot much more than I'd trust Dvorak's insights...
Do you remember "How to Kill Linux" and the article (I didn't found it) about Google preparing to launch an OS?
If MS really were after Macromedia, wouldn't Apple have been in there quicksmart?
An Apple/Macromedia merger would make me feel a bit better about the future direction of Macromedia software. Too late now though.
After laughing my way through "John Dvorak Predicts", I have come to understand that, in order to achieve true wisdom, one must learn to ignore everything John Dvorak says.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Adobe probably thought that Macromedia prices were too low.
/. will defend the move claiming that its for pros and that anyway, its better than MS buying them (the reason will be vague, seeing how Adobe is a bigger set of jerks than MS).
They did this for Macromedia's own good.
Plus, it starts too quickly. Flash should be just like Acrobat and take 6 seconds to load plus have a bunch of plug-ins that you never use but load anyway.
And they'll make it a lot more complicated to use...everybody from
The paradigm is shifting. The open source steam roller is bearing down on Adobe. Buying another proprietary company won't help with that. They need a serious shift in strategy.
OK so Gimp isn't quite there yet but there is really a lot of image processing stuff out there that, once consolidated, will be much more powerful than anything Adobe has. It's a race and Adobe has no chance in the long run if they keep going the way they are.
I wonder if Apple or Microsoft will buy Adobe in the next few years?
Why, everyone! Dvorak acts as if they aren't a threat and they shouldn't worry. Very silly: Netscape did the same thing and look at them now!
Microsoft have proven themselves to be a fierce competitor. If they decided to move into image manipulation software, then Adobe would (and should) be frightened. That's because Microsoft doesn't try to compete: it tries to monopolise. That's their whole culture: paranoia that they might become second in the market and thus have their business die. So they act like an 800 pound gorilla and attempt (many times succeeding) to pulverise and totally destroy their competition. And despite the anti-trust trial, they haven't really changed their business tactics.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Adobe's products are too dead-tree oriented. Their best-known online technology, Acrobot, just displays an page image on your screen -- a totally outdated approach to online publishing. Macromedia has a lot of expertise they need and don't have. Dvorak, being totally ignorant of the very technology he pretends to cover, doesn't seem to know that.
So I read TFA, and what did I see?
Empty ramblings. Assertion. No proof, no quotes, nothin'.
I know it's an opinion piece. It's still a waste of space.
Incidentally, the share price of MACR is now well above what it was before the takeover was announced, so his crap about the market "dropping" the stock is blatant nonsense.
Er, are you sure about that? Adobe bought CoolEdit from Syntrillium and sold it as "Adobe Audition", no problem.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Why Did Adobe Buy Macromedia?
To get to the other side?
I'm sorry, but it's 420 day.
Why wont he write about a google micropayment system integrated with google desktop? Sort off like Millicent. Unobtrusive .. one click on an icon with no forms to fill out (cause the amount of money is small). It can be protected against fraud by reducing the max. transaction amoutn and limiting time between multiple transactions etc.
.. that'll be cool to buy TV shows off google .. cant they arrange something like napster to make it happen?
Actually Microsoft can pull this off too.
Also I like the idea of a Google "buy this song" thing coming up when you search for media on google.
Whats going to happen to fireworks now???
Will Adobe put the same amount of effort into it as they do with photoshop??
I like photoshop, but everything I have learned I first did in fireworks & I feel more comfortable using it.
I hope Adobe won't force people across to photoshop to save a few bucks continuing to develop fireworks.
You see, if they made a web browser, and it started to compete with IE and Firefox, not to mention Safari, they would then incorporate all of their software with it. You would never have to download flash, shockwave, or acrobat again. Of course, those would probably be the only things this supposed web browser would display correctly.
-- johntracy.com, because everybody else is wrong.
Do me a big favor, please. Do NOT tell Adobe that Microsoft is about to hire me and give me a job! ...
Honest.
[o]_O
Clearly Adobe felt a little left behind... which is why they put a lot of backing into SVF and dhtml in their products, but it seems they've now acknowledged their tools will always be a second best to Dreamweaver and Flash Creator, which is a bit annoying when so much web design work beings in Photoshop or Imageready.
The same is true of Macromedia itself of many years ago, Shockwave was a bloated mofo intended for CD-Roms and then bolted onto the web in the form of a heafty plugin with hefty media files.
No wonder a little startup called FutureWave that made a product called FutureSplash (you can do the cockney rhyming slang yourself) scared the hell out of them and they snapped them up right away in 1996 thus obviously giving the world Macromedia Flash. If Macromedia didn't have the foresight to buy up what would become Flash then they'd be in trouble right now... maybe Adobe see's Macromedia in the same light, given a few years and a few cool products could they of afforded not to buy up Macromedia?
Oh yeah... as for MS, they producted a long defunk product called LiquidMotion that tried to emulate Flash, it seems it may have been killed given the pressure from the DOJ case and obvious accusations of embrace and extended.
Speculatory at best.
What I see is that Adobe wanted to put flash in pdf and MacroM didn't want to license cheap. So Adobe bought MM to get Flash, and now I see the reverse: Acrobat Reader 8.0 implemented in flash with on-demand font-laguage and all that crap.
Also, PDF with flash becomes fully animated, media-rich format.
I think that dreamweaver will essentially become a photoshop add-on. This way, very smart graphic designers will make a beautiful graphic, click on the "Dream-Weave-it" button, and presto: A complete web page with rollovers from layers.
As far as the Macromedia people, they had best get ready to wear the Adobe hat or find themselves on the street.
What else. Flash. Yes, back to Flash. If I email you a PDF document, and now it's on your PC, and you open it, and flash is inbedded in it, and you're connected to the net via your ever-present dsl line, flash can actually go to the web and pull content. So Adobe Acrobat Reader has now become a web browser, since a well-designed flash can emulate a website.
Finally, I think Adobe is in decent shape, but they have to be careful, because while they had photoshop and acrobat, they were still essentially in a lucrative niche market. They have become a bigger fish, and they are going to find that they have a lot more competitors. And just perhaps they might find that the best macromedia people will start working elsewhere and competing too.
Was my post speculative enough for you?
"Piter, too, is dead."
huh?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I think that they bought Macromedia because they [Adobe] were having problems with Macintosh development [for OSX]. Macromedia has been developing for Macs longer than Adobe and knows the systems inside-and-out. This would give Adobe more of a push to take back the Macintosh video market back from Apple [Final Cut (Pro) is big competition for Premiere]
Video Production Support
Yup, he really said that
OH SHIT... SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS is EATING 100% of my CPU !?!? Gotta run.
The more important question is whether or not Slashdot will now invest in software from either company and update the look of the site.
Macromedia was gaining traction with selling Flash Lite players to mobile phone manufacturers. Adobe was competing by supporting an open standard, SVG with its mobile authoring tools.
Now Adobe eliminates this competitor by owning it.
But meanwhile, on phones, SVG is proliferating.
SVG is an open standard, XML, scriptable, event-driven UI.
Will Macrodobe support an oepn standard mobile web?
Or will it want developers to pay $xxx for tools to author content for the mobile web using formats it owns and controls?
Dreamweaver.
I am so sick of these companies buying each other out and then sending good products out to die on the whim of some management.
Free market my A$$!
Imagine (No not one of those) Flash embedded into a PDF file! Or the new PFD (Portable Flash Document).
Seriously! You heard it here first.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
If you don't support Adobe, you don't support America. If you use FrontPage, then the terrorist have already won.
at least MS would have respect for all the tools that MM has created.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Like any good company, they don't do anything out of fear. They did it to corner the desktop publishing market. They are a well-run company looking to destroy competition to ensure future profits. Period.
I don't think Adobe really cares all that much about any Macromedia software except Flash. It's another PDF to them.
If Adobe were being generous, they might release another version of Macromedia titles. But they're not, so I expect most Macromedia software will just die.
FYI: As a lesson to those who don't know, track Macromedia and Adobe's share prices and you'll see that the many shareholders knew about the merger well ahead of the announcement. Note where share values diverge.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
...claim trademark on the term 'PDF'? I know its just a file extension, but the way corporate america has its way with the Trademark and Patent offices, I'm supprised it hasn't happened.
Wouldn't have thought of it but risky in terms of head to head competition. Spend money to save money (maybe) I guess.
ogg
Black cat, searing pain, flames...? I must be in Heaven! - Homer Simpson
Macromedia bought out a long-forgotten company who created ColdFusion. Anyone care to comment on who that was?
I seem to recall during the crazy buy-out race in the eighties and nineties, that purchase figures were rarely that huge. Viacom buying Blockbuster, (or was it the other way around?) and giant media corps never dealt in that kind of price range!
Anybody who tells me Adobe products aren't insanely over-priced is nuts. Pirating is clearly not a problem to Adobe's bottom line! Sheesh.
Real companies which build physical items need significant price tags to keep their factories working. Software, by contrast, is infinitely reproducible for pennies. Selling a $10 package (Box, disk, manual), for $800-$1,200 per unit is morally bankrupt!
3.4 BILLION? I mean. . , come on! Not to mention, it's only been quite recently that their products didn't crap out all the time. --In the print bureaus I've dealt with, they called it "Ragemaker" because the layout package had so many bugs.
3.4 BILLION???
Wow. Just, Wow.
-FL
No, really. Has John Dvorak *ever* been right in a meaningful way about *anything* of importance in this industry?
To me, he's always seemed to just strike the most provocative opinion he can, presumably just to draw readership.
What is an original Adobe app? Illustrator and Photoshop and PostScript, otherwise the big "core" tools came from outside, Aldus for Pagemaker and GoLive was GoLive CyberStudio. FrameMaker came from Frame Technologies.
This is a poorly argued point even for Dvorak. Whether or not the buy-out is a good move for Adobe, the idea that they would pay 3.4 bil for a company just to avoid Microsoft is fairly ludicrous. And his assertion that Flash is the program that "powers those annoying web animations" is about as stupid as saying Photoshop is responsible for "those dumb pictures." Personally, I am excited about the prospect of Adobe developing Macromedia's assets. Much of Macromedia's products never hit their targets squarely, neither designers nor developers. The artistic feature set of Flash never radically grew from the state it was in when it was called "FutureSplash" when Macromedia bought it, and as a development platform it underperformed. Adobe certainly has it's fair share of duds in it's portfolio but they have nicely developed their bedrock products, version after version. Some may complain about bloat in Photoshop, but I can say as someone who uses it every day that their feature set is well thought out. And it remains one of the most elegant pieces of software ever assembled. Perhaps Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and After Effects haven't developed as quickly as some would like, but they remain excellent pieces of software. And Adobe has managed to update them smartly. It remains to be seen as to whether they can manage web design and development as well as video and print, but I am excited as to the prospects of making even better dumb web animations.
At least, according to this.
The push into web media comes as a surprise, but I guess the Microsoft angle makes sense (which the article also talks about).
I don't want to read
It's assumed that Adobe will redesign the interfaces of key Macromedia products to match its own
That'd be pretty dumb since Macromedia interfaces are much better.
Macromedia sells JRun, a Java Application Server, which they acquired when they absorbed Allaire. I'm guessing that if M$ bought Macromedia, we would see another Java to .Net conversion tool from Microsoft.
Or would Microsoft continue to support a Java Application Server - yeah right.
"Within 12-18 months" I believe was his exact words, in March '03. Don't listen to this moron.
They'd be calling it MicroMedia, or Macrosoft. That IS scary. Thanks for saving us from that fate, Adobe!
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Why would Microsoft want Macromedia? Lets run through Macromedia's product line for a second:
.NET platform, why would they need these?
.NET, why on earth would it need yet more?
* ColdFusion, Flex, Breeze, etc. - Server side scripting and application servers. Microsoft has IIS and their
* Flash and related client-side technologies - Microsoft is bringing out Avalon, a graphical engine for developing Internet applications without needing a web browser, so they don't need this.
* Dreamweaver and other editors - Microsoft focuses its development platform solely behind Visual Studio
So, to put it simply, Microsoft had no reason to buy Macromedia.
However, it is well known that Macromedia have had financial difficulties over the past few years. With many excellent technologies and applications they have IMHO suffered from a lack of focus and direction which has ultimately hit their bottom line. I do think that they would have been bought out sooner or later, either that or gone through some major internal reshuffling (and firings) to fix the situation - I guess we now know which they opted for.
Damien
Microsoft has just bought out Adobe!
John Dvorak is an idiot.
Just recently Adobe is slowly showing more interests in Linux and its users. Now that they have Macromedia, whats the possibility to have say Dreamweaver and Flash for Linux? I would think that Linux and those 2 packages would make for the choice platform for web content developers. And if (and hope) they bring Photoshop to Linux as well then the transition would be simple for more developers and designers to make the jump to Linux.
What are "free copies of Macromedia" and how do you do professional image editing with them? How did you get modded "Insightful"?
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
This is indeed the business model of today. Don't innovate! just buy!
I hope they fix those annoying styles in MX04. I have to use MX04 at work, and I opened up a page in code view to fix a font tag that just refused to work. I ended up deleting about 15 pages of open and close tags that served no purpose.
Plus, the fact that I have to open the code view almost daily to make my fonts actually conform to what I want, verse what MX04 wants, is annoying. When I do personal projects, I use MX03. I never have to deal with the buggy style usage, and my projects are done so much faster.
I heard a commentator on National Public Radio talk about this merger, and he made lots of sense. PDF has been a defacto standard for web documents for quite a while, and Flash has been gaining lots of ground fast when it comes to streaming media. Basically he said that now, with both PDF and Flash, Adobe Systems will be well positioned to do a complete end-around Microsoft. With regards to Web apps, Adobe will now have the muscle and means to treat the OS as just a commodity. It won't matter who's OS you're running because you'll still be able to use Adobe's products in your web browser.
To a company like Microsoft that's invested itself totally into a "Windows Everywhere" philosophy, that's gotta seem very ominous.
#DeleteChrome
Macromedia popcorn is yummy :)
MS prolly didn't buy them because they're already pushing their luck. The DoJ and /. would have their ass in a sling...
Trust John Dvorak!
The creator of the world's most useless keyboard!
Look, damnit! if he was any kind of predictor, why isn't he rich, yet?
Dvorak is an intelligent guy, but his forte is not writing intelligent articles and it's not why magazines pay him. He's on the payroll because he makes crazy, outlandish statments that drive up the number of hits on the site. Ten years ago, he couldn't pump out Apple-bashing editorials fast enough, becuase outraged Mac users would read them and then pass around links to fellow Mac users to read his predictions of Apple's demise.
John Dvorak is by far the most sucessful troll in the computing industry, and is a gold mine for advertizer revenue.
So this is the Second time that Adobe has bought Freehand (remember Aldus). I wonder who it will go to now. or if they will just bury it. BTW, they should've bought Quark instead way back when, I dont think anyone actually working in publishing at the time was still using Pagemaker when Adobe bought Aldus. I miss the name Macromind. I thought it had a much edgier ring than Macromedia. Im amazed that Adobe didnt make this move a long time ago. As far as photoshop goes. I think it got to the top because A. it had no real competition at the time. and B. from Piracy. Everybody uses Photoshop because everybody knows Photoshop. I was reading elsewhere in this post about the new security measures Adobe has put into CS. I think its interesting that nobody I know is using CS. I work in the game industry and everyone I know is still using 6 or 7. I think people generally want to keep it compatable with what they have at home. It would be interesting to see the sales figures on CS vs. other upgrades. I think Piracy helped Adobe, and I think they know it. Otherwise they wouldve done a hardware dongle or security software a long time ago. But thats all my speculation, and its off topic anyhow.
Now that Adobe will be owning flash, maybe they'll make the Flash player on Mac be as fast as what it is on Windows? I'm just getting sick of the slow flash animations on my Macintosh.
I don't want any, it obviously makes you stupid.
From TFPCmagA you linked to:
On the PC side of the fence, no Z-80 maker survived even the transition to the 8080.
I suspect he meant 8086 instead of 8080, as that's the only way the statement would make any sense whatsoever.
The last time I read DVORAK regularly, his columns were full of NAMES of people in the industry, as well as other RANDOM words in the text made BOLD. It was quite STRANGE reading.
Tag lost or not installed.
They also wanted to get into the non-portable consoles industry - traditionnaly owned and led by Japanese companies such as Nintendo, Sega and recently Sony. All other non-japanese companies failed to get into that market. Microsoft announces the Xbox. It costed them millions in terms of investments. In the beginning, they were loosing 100$ for each console they sold. So what? The objective was to make themselves a room in the market, not to make money. They already make money with Windows, Office and other things other companies now totally rely on. The result : Sega is now dead as a console manufacturer, Nintendo is no longer leading the market, and only Sony can really stand up against Microsoft.
So I guess my point is that, given the billions Microsoft can invest in any given project, they can do whatever they want. They could have offered Adobe's developpers 3 times what they were paid so they would come over. They even could have had them move to another country than the US, so the clauses in their contracts that (I imagine) prevent them to work in another company doing the same thing would be void (I assume here that the devs would be motivated only by cash and not loyalty, but it's not the point, really, because Adobe's developpers are not the only ones with that kind of skill; but they allow a better example). So I think that in the end Adobe made a good move, because they only made Microsoft's eventual objective harder to reach. But not impossible.
Buying everything in sight, often to undercut a competitor, sound like the common tactic for that game, Monopoly. Nope, no irony there.
So, mostly out of fear, Adobe buys its main competitor and now must shoehorn the company into its unfortunate not-invented-here corporate culture. (This aspect of Adobe is another story in itself.)
I must say that I'm shocked, utterly shocked, that an established (read has been) company would buy out its competition, and have difficulty incorperating the bought company into its not-invented-here culture. This is truly an unprecendented level of corperate miscaulculation and audacity!
The "not-invented-here corporate culture" can't be that bad - as long as you hav enough money to buy, instead of inventing.
Just ask Microsoft.
Game over.
640YB ought to be enough for anybody.
There are sure a lot of retarded comments on this post. Why would Adobe want Macromedia?
t op.
To finally get a real jump in the interactive world. Dreamweaver is the best WYSWIG editor out there and way better than Go-Live. Flash is definetly the web standard for vector based interactive on the web and kicks ass over SVG, which might be widely supported (if you down load the plug-in), but does not have a lot of support from web developers. Cold Fusion is just as solid as ASP, and can can be integrated easily to Flash using Flash Remoting.
Adobe will finally have a solid stake in the web world, which will now give them control over print AND interactive mediums. The only thing left for Adobe is to try and buy the Final Cut suite from Apple (of course that's not gonna happen).
I also read about people comparing Adobe to MS. What in the world are you thinking? There are other options out there! Adobe software just far outperforms all the others. It's not like they have a monoply on in the market then let their products go to shit (i.e. MS). Photoshop, illustrator and indesign all have had major competition in the past. Anyone remember that not long ago, Quark had a strangle hold on the desktop publishing market? And to you people who think Gimp holds a candle to Photoshop, need to wake the fuck up. I think open-source software is great, and Gimp is a solid program, but come on, if you really know what your doing, it is not even close.
Microsoft buys up good software, then either scraps it, or sells it with little to no improvements. Microsoft software sucks.
Adobe does a great job with their user interfaces, which is why Macromedia was using the same structure. In 2000, right before Flash 5 was released, Adobe won a lawsuit against Macromedia for infringing its patent: http://news.com.com/2100-1040-898061.html?tag=fd_
Either way, there are numerous reasons for Adobe to want to purchase Macromedia. There are also probably a lot of reasons why MS would want to own Macromedia, but who cares, they didn't, so why stir the pot with a BS story with with no proof?
Why would Corel buy Metacreations' Painter and Bryce?
Why would Corel buy Jasc?
Probably the ability to sell more products under different brand names and not need to worry about the competition, but that's just my two cents.
The only real product they compete on is Illustrator vs. Freehand and Adobe was finally winning that battle.
A few years back they were in direct competition, but Macromedia focused on the web and Adobe on print. If you design for the web you use Macromedia - Dreamweaver and Flash. If you design for print you use Adobe - Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. This merges both online and print.
Of course since this is Slashdot - here is the real reason Adobe purchased Macromedia - to Kill Fontographer. Years back Adobe purchased a company to get the source for FontMonger and once purchased, the product was no longer available. This will allow Adobe to kill the last great font creation application.
You see this is all about Helvica besting Ariel.
John Dvorak is a pinhead. Macromedia's portfolio seems more complementary than competitive in the places Adobe makes most of its money. Adobe is wise, not paranoid, to worry about Microsoft, who would love nothing more than to dominiate the electronic document/PDF space. Why does Dvorak believe Adobe has a bad attitude toward things not invented there? Adobe is happy to acquire and integrate useful technologies and companies, such as Aldus (for PageMaker and the then-under-development InDesign) or Accelio (for PDF/forms in the enterprise space). Dvorak? Pinhead.
(moderators, it's a meta-joke, get it????)
"If Microsoft really want's..." Please, there's no need for this. Do we have to bring up Bob the Angry Flower again?
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Are you sure you mean Photoshop CS, not Photoshop Album? Photoshop CS is Adobe's flagship product, and a *serious* image editor. 16bpp, L*A*B, CMYK, ICC color management, oodles of awesome filters, the works.
Photoshop Album is their cut down "consumer" variant, and rather more likely to be what you meant.
Macromedia is not doing as well as they should however they do have technology that fits very well in the Adobe sceme of things. While it is possible that MS would have bought Macromedia it is unlikelly since it really won't bring anything to MS. As a matter of fact Macromedia does not fit well at all with MS. The fact that they produce cross platform and cross brouser technology goes very much against the exclusivity that MS like to use. You can't even access the windows update site unless you run IE on windows. So in that aspect Macromedia does not fit in with MS at all. However, latelly Adobe has started supporting multiple OSes and porting Acrobat to linux and mac os so fast is probably only the first step. Plus Macromedia's technologies will allow Adobe to expand even more. So I really don't think that the reason for the purchase was fear of direct MS compotition. Sure enought no company wants to go head to head against MS but this doesn't seem to be the case with Adobe. All this just looks like the right oportunity came up and they went for it. Plus conspiracy theories are really not that cool.
Then we all partied so Hearty that they called the cops on us.
Macromedia figured out that they would do better by leapfrogging Adobe, and jumping directly into webcentric software. To that end they basically killed off everything that wasn't web centric - xRes died a quick and merciful death, fontgrapher was shelved (and for this they earned incredibley bad karma, because fontLab is a fat POS with a crap UI - although it does rock for font output formats... it's just a world of pain for anyone trying to design anything...), and they killed off FreeHand a few years back and Director's got a tube up its nose.
They set about buying serverside stuff, like cold fusion, and developed various workflow systems for Dreamweaver, itself an acquisition, called FutureFlash.
I don't think this acquisition could have happened if MM had not killed off FreeHand and fontographer.
You can be QUITE certain that now that Adobe owns the codebase, FH and Fog are so completely dead as to be like, deader than dead.
This is a MAJOR acquisition. This is a MAJOR consolidation in the software market. It is not a time for rejoicing. Expect some very bad things.
Predictions:
Adobe will not sell FreeHand.
Adobe will not sell Fontographer.
Adobe will kill off Director within 3 years.
Adobe will "merge" GoLive and Dreamweaver, which will be good for GoLive and bad for Dreamweaver.
PDF will acquire flash-centric elements - this includes video...
Adobe will Rule The Roost in publishing (and don't give me any lip about GIMP - GIMP's UI sux ass and it's ability to handle CMYK or (x) plate printing is zero, and Adobe OWNZ that already - this will increase their hold on it.
Fireworks is TOAST. Dead within a year.
This is going to require people to completely re-think workflows and processes.
I for one DO NOT look forward to our Abobe Overlords.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
http://www.xsmiles.org/xsmiles_features.html
Here's something Jesse might have overlooked. How do you reinvigorate the PDF franchise and make it part of the future? By easily enabling dynamic pdf's.
Adobe acquired a way to do just that. With ColdFusion 7 they have an easy to use, java based, scripting language that already provides a fast and scalable way to generate dynamic PDF's.
The only thing ColdFusion lacked at Macromedia was an aggressive marketing budget. I'm betting CF-7's PDF creation capabilities will only get better.
Man Homes
i for one look foward to seeing the macromedia code cleaned out. the entire macromedia mx series is a bloated piece of junk. The only other suit that runs slower on my 1.5ghz powerbook is MS Office
I think they actually meant Photoshop Elements, which is the slimmed down consumer version of Photoshop CS, but is still quite usable. Photoshop Album is actually a really terrible piece of software you often see bundled for free with digital imaging devices.
You're quite right, it was Photoshop Elements that I meant.
Whoops.
for a nice price increase in all golive/photoshop products. No competition = supreme ruler = pay what we want not what its worth.
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
Furthermore, with Microsoft being a convicted monopolist, (ignore the weak googlebombing...) wouldn't the SEC have to look into the merger first? I mean how fair would it be for Microsoft to once again have a monopoly on any technology?
I think the SEC would see that Flash has really no rival technology at the moment, and that it is a software monopoly simply out of caring; No company has cared to implement anything like it, even though the technology and standards exist to rival it. Microsoft owning it would be yet another way they could use their economic position to hose competition (kinda like how Microsoft poisoned Java).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
"Yes, Java will be used for dinky mini-apps (writer/programmer Rob Hummel calls them "craplets") and as a way to add animation to stagnant Web pages, but not much more." - John C. Dvorak, 1996
"Folks, the Mac platform is through... ." - John C. Dvorak, 1998
"Nobody is predicting the comeback of the IPO market except me." - John C. Dvorak, 2002
"Hollywood will begin to promote the new digital theater, using the latest movie projectors..." - John C. Dvorak, 2002
"Isn't it about time the Macintosh was simply discontinued--put down like an old dog?" - John C. Dvorak, 2004
"The Mac platform is essentially stagnant. ... I'm now convinced that this stems mostly from Apple's inability to make the Mac a commodity computer by pricing it to compete with PCs made inexpensively in China and selling with razor-thin margins." - John C. Dvorak, 2004
The guy is a GENIUS!
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
DRM isn't Instant Evil
Be careful tossing those kind of ideas around...once someone invents Instant Evil(tm), MS will warp space and time moving so fast to snap them up. Watch out for warp ripples in space/time.
You can say all you want about Dvorak, but just remember one thing:
His job is not to write articles that are accurate, reflective, probing, revealing, humorous, or anything else.
His job is simply to write something that generates a click to the site, so that they can get a little ad revenue.
Regardless of what you think about this article, he did his job pretty well.
-David
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? The synergy opportunities are tremendous!
I eagerly await the post-merger product release, "Flash-o-crap".
That's all there is to it. If you don't expand to become a Big Player, you get forced out or bought. There is no more room for independents. There is no more room for niche companies. We're already at the cusp of a world where all niche companies are merely divisions of huge multinationals.
So Adobe could either buy Macromedia, or let someone else do it. If someone else (MS?) did so, then Adobe would be next on the chopping block.
It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, guaranteed by late-stage capitalism.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Microsoft may end up owning Windows desktops, but Longhorn's graphics will never be cross platform, so both MACR and ADBE want to be on cell phones. Its key to their survival. This isn't about desktop apps, its about ubiquitous platforms. Flash is eating Java's cake. Adobe isn't stupid.
I think Dvorak missed the little press releases about Flash on DoCoMo phones. What a pompous blowhard...
As usual, Dvorak has his head up where the sun don't shine!
Anyone remember Aldus Pagemaker or Cool Edit Pro?
Now Adobe Pagemaker and Adobe Audition.
Seems Adobe has a history of acquiring products and integrating them with their own product line, despite what Dvorak says.
"So, mostly out of fear, Adobe buys its main competitor and now must shoehorn the company into its unfortunate not-invented-here corporate culture. (This aspect of Adobe is another story in itself.)" Not invented here... Hmm... Flash wasn't born there, it started life as Future Splash Animator (in the mid to late 90's). Neither was Freehand which started life at Aldus.
Or, more appropriately, why does India have nukes?
It ain't Pakistan, it's China.
Macrodobe has a disgusting amount of leverage that neither Adobe nor Macromedia alone have - lop Quark out of the equation and Macrodobe OWNS desktop publishing on two platforms. Artschool/Vo-Tech "web design" ? They'll own that. Graphics creation and production? Yeah, Apple makes your swankass Final Cut Pro but you're still doing the graphics for your overlays in Macrodobe Photoshop MX 2006.
You really think Apple or Microsoft can afford to piss off The De Facto Graphics Standard?
No.
Hell, Apple suffered for YEARS under Adobe's continuing threats to drop Mac support for $fillintheblank because whatever Apple was intending to do to the OS (full memory protection planned for 9.3, for example- which had been planned and Working for awhile but was never implemented for this reason) would "force them to rewrite their applications" and there wasn't enough money in the mac market to make that worthwhile (bullshit).
If it wasn't for Photoshop and Illustrator, Apple would have probably told them to shove it years ago. Hell, the steaming pile of shit that is Premiere is one of the primary reasons that iMovie and the light version of FCP exist at all - video editing on the mac prior to these apps was like mp3 playback on the mac prior to iTunes - it either Sucked Horribly or you paid out the ass for something Awesome (usually hardware linked) to do it. No middle ground.
I'm ranting, I'm ranting... but Macromedia's OS X apps are actually semi-decent (Flash support blows a dead moose, but it always has), and Adobe's leave a lot to be desired. "Why is Photoshop 5.5 running IN CLASSIC FASTER than Photoshop CS for just about everything?!" kind of a lot to be desired.
As a Creative Professional, I'm disgusted to see one of the three companies I buy software from (Macromedia, Adobe, Apple) get swallowed up by the asshole of the three.
It is not a huge leap to take Flash and see developers using it to crank out low-end RAD/inhouse apps much like people did with VisualBasic in the olden days. Of the compeititon out there, Flash is the one with a real userbase that could pose a threat.
.NET/XAML/Avalon is that it's targetted at Java and has much higher sophistication level. So there is also a risk that MS loses the low-end entry-level developers. Plus Flash is portable, small, and fast.
The issue with
So, to put it simply, Microsoft had no reason to buy Macromedia.
Paranoia and eliminating or neutering compeitition are reasons. Your post made the point that Macromedia really does go toe-to-toe with MS for web development.
Fortunately for Microsoft, Macromedia never made a full-fledged developer tools push and Adobe is even less likely to do so.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
I feel Adobe is not interested in a lot of what they bought. They just bought market share and security.
There is really little overlap with Macromedia, Adobe isn't interested in blending Fireworks and GoLive and their not interested in blending FreeHand and Illustrator. The fact is the code bases aren't going to be compatable, I love FreeHand don't get me wrong, but it would be a lot easier to build up things like multi page documents into Illustrator than move it from FreeHand. However that would greatly saw off their market for selling InDesign and PageMaker. Lots of small shops buy the suits and thus Adobe makes more.
I imagine that Adobe is interested in propagating only a few of Macromedia's products. ColdFusion, which will become a PDF centric wonderland. They may also keep some of Macromedia's enterprise products but their probably going to either drop most of them, keep Macromedia running as a mostly independant company or just leave the products and peter them out.
We're not going to see fancy hybrids here. Adobe pushes PDF and Macromedia doesn't. End of story, adobe isn't going to become any less PDF crazy because they've got a bunch of hackish tools.
today... Adobe buys Macromedia, tommorow... Microsoft buys Adobe.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
What company would you rather have your company be bought out by?
:)
A company that produces poor products that are unstable, or a company that produces excellent products that are generally high-quality and stable?
Do I even need to tell you which is which?
Ok, one ring to rule them all... No more Golive vs Dreamweaver, it'll be one suite. Adobe has some great programs for graphics, pdf etc while Macromedia has Fireworks, Flash etc... Who wouldn't want a powerhouse with all these products under one company name?
Because for almost a decade I worked, lived and breathed Macromedia products. Not to say that I did not utilize anything else, but on any given day in my current career, I would be opening up Macromedia software about 70% of the time. I would say that is true for a large number of web designers/web application developers. Everytime I hear someone saying "they blocked Flash because of the stupid ads" has probably not seen Flash's potential or at least, not aware of it. Take a look at some of the interfaces when you get your airline tickets processed, or book events at an online kiosk. Flash (coupled with other technologies). bank machine terminals - Flash interface (again coupled with other technologies). Please do not compare Flash with Adobe Acrobat. FlashPaper was the closest equivalent. Please check out all the bloggers who use Macromedia tools (as well as blogs from Macromedia employees) to see their expectations for the future. Yes some sort of Acrobat hybrid with dynamic Flash capabilities is proposed, but more likely Adobe will take advantage of FlashPaper technology and attempt to fix acrobat. FlashPaper, being newer, is lighter, utilizes swf (making it more ubiquitous) and easier to develop with than current Acrobat forms. Fireworks - I was testing Fireworks back in its early betas. It was the Fireworks tool that developers first saw the concept of "slicing" an image into a series of smaller images within an HTML table (a process, I recall we used to do manually on graph paper, then manually cut up in an ancient version of Photoshop). Fireworks was premised to be a "Photoshop" killer for the web...and it did get Adobe scared, as Adobe developed and released imageready (which no one bought), then integrated it into Photoshop so that an existing PS user base would slowly kill off the smaller but rabid Fireworks base. Expectation: Fireworks will die, but its process and functionalities will merge into ImageReady. ImageReady produced retarded code for the longest time, so it was due for a fix (and those who thought otherwise obviously was no expert in Fireworks). Flash - Now there was/is Macromedia's crown jewel. An appealing option for Adobe. Also Microsoft, (based on Flash's popularity as a technology, and don't blame Macromedia for the content produced within Flash - just because a large number of content providers use Flash for banners and other junk, that is the content being bad, not Flash). There were lawsuits a few years back over tool interfaces between Adobe and Macromedia, with Flash being a sorespot (Flash 5 had Photoshop-like palettes). Now they can save their legal fees and hopefully invest it into some improvement. Director - may join with Premiere? Dreamweaver - the story is that GoLive was a decent editor for the Mac system - GoLive was bought by Adobe; large numbers of their technical and marketing team left and joined - Macromedia - creating Dreamweaver. GoLive is released under Adobe and languishes. Adobe buys Macromedia, now has the entire GoLive team back under its belt. Homesite - came when Macromedia bought Allaire, due to disappear. Server Producsts - Flash Communication Server; Flex; Central; ColdFusion (under JRun); Jrun - probably survive, since Adobe never really had a strong server app tier market (though they tried awhile back) Now have the basis for strong web app development Freehand - hmm, probably disappearing. RoboDemo and the rest of the online help/education space; benefit to Adobe, as they can get into that market. Obviously, this thread is a testimonial to the impact that Macromedia's software has had on all of us, whether you used it or not, whether you loved the tools or hated the tools, you knew the tools. Hopefully Macromedia's tools won't go the way of tools Microsoft's Liquid Motion or Adobe's Live Motion and die...
just a web application developer and instructor in Toronto, ON Canada
Dvorak seems to be at great pains to point out that Adobe is just paranoid about Microsoft being out to get them but considering MS's history is that really that far fetched? The list of companies who've sat on their laurels only to find themselves blindsided by MS isn't exactly short. Borland, Corel, Lotus, Netscape etc etc. Personally I'd be reinventing and innovating like crazy too just to stay one step ahead. And that's not a bad thing.
The article is an opinion piece. Who does this guy think he is? No one took up his crappy keyboard design so why would they listen to him about anything else?
Yes, that was a joke.
ERROR: Post assumes that Corel has a clue what it's doing.
Ok, here's my best shot. Thanks to the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for the lyrics and karaoke music.
Big Adobe went to town
Riding with great worry
"Microsoft might buy our foes
Goodness let us hurry"
Big Adobe, buy them out
Big Adobe dandy
Mind the lawsuits and the FUD
And with your cash be handy
Macromedia went to the web
With great Flash and vigour
Then Adobe said to them:
"We ownz you, start to quiver"
Big Adobe, buy them out
Get yourself a trophy
Buy a business out of fear
And call it Macradobe
All you geeks and all you nerds
Reading this here story
Remember what the Parent said
And call it Macradobe
Adobe paid so much for Macromedia so they could inflate the already-overinflated ego of the Incredibly Annoying Marc Cantor, and to get the already-rock-bottom-stupid opinion of the Incredibly Annoying John Dvorak and stick them together into an unholy reaction that will power the world's Mac computers for another century, freeing up all that cash for Adobe.
fifth sigma, inc.
I think Adobe buying Macromedia for 3.4 billions is a very positive step for all - that includes developers and users alike. The name Adobe has been synonymous to such excellent softwares like Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. And buying a company having popular products like flash and dreamweaver will make the products in the Adobe forte stronger.
;).
I concede that flash and dreamweaver may not be sustained. But all the good things of both these products will surely find its way into adobe's flagship products which as far as the end user is concerned is a big plus. Think of pdf documents having flash (like) animations and videos.
And why would'nt they bring out a version of their product also for linux (or maybe redhat and suse linux? ) After all they are said to have the microsoft phobia and what better way to strike microsoft than to port their excellent products to the linux platform - it is like literally pulling the rug from under microsoft's feet. That will open the flood gates of people moving over to linux. That could also be a nail in the coffin of Apple
Now the rumour of microsoft interested in macromedia - I think is a bit far out to be true. For one: microsoft is a giant with so much money that it supasses even the GDP of many countries. Microsoft has the financial strength as well as the monopoly enjoyed by its Os and it is fully capable - as of this point of time - to bring out its own products in which ever area of the IT field it chooses. And 3.4 billion is peanuts to microsoft. If it were interested in macromedia, it could have succeeded in bidding more than adobe - which it did not.
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
No thanks, I'll pass.
The answer to this question probably depends on whether we see Adobe as a maker of design tools, or as a company whose business is to define the experience of using computers at a visual level.(Remember before PostScript there was really no such thing as Typography on computing devices.)
Now we are a few years away from Longhorn being out there and stable in the marketplace, but it will deliver a much richer interface to the web and the computing experience in general without the need for 3rd party apps and plug ins. Why deliver content with Flash when you already have a vector based display engine built into the OS?
This is a smart move by Adobe IMO, but only if they use the capabilities of both companies to push the graphic/visual aspect of the computing experience forward instead of just consolidating their application base.
Everybody knows Adobe as the inventor of PDF, but unfortunately the company was nowhere on the servermarket. MacroMedia on the other hand has a more than interesting server product: Cold Fusion. The combination of both technologies looks very promising to me.
But wait a minute! Weren't you able to produce PDF documents with Cold Fusion? Of course you were: ColdFusion MX 7.0 is shipped with the iText.jar (iText, a free Java-PDF library, hosted on SourceForge, originally developped by yours truly).
And now comes the funny part: due to some regulations I don't fully understand, MM can't use any Adobe technology (or vice versa) till the end of the year. This means that the new company Adobe Systems will be shipping iText in their products for PDF generation.
The company that invented PDF, shipping my F/OS library hosted at SourceForge! What a weird way things work out some times.
I just cant understand why did not MS buy Macro Media? I mean Macro Media has great arsnel of products which every one agree's is critical to web-publishing. MS has the cash, why did it let Adobe buy it?
If you play Go, you know the proverb that "your opponent's good move is your good move".
It could be that Microsoft would have bought Macromedia simply because they thought it would have been good for Adobe. If Adobe and Microsoft compete at all (I hear rumblings about a Photoshop competitor, and other digital media programs), then what's bad for Adobe is good for Microsoft.
In other words, it doesn't need to directly help Microsoft. As long as it would directly hurt Adobe, then it would indirectly help Microsoft.
Do I think it's beneath even Microsoft to buy a medium-sized company out of (basically) spite? Perhaps. Then again, I'd never bet against Microsoft buying a company for strategic reasons.
Talk about a spoilsport!
Seriously, though, as a Graphic Designer, I don't like the implications of this either.
fs
One of the reasons Photoshop is the last professional bitmap editor standing is the fact that its interface was one of the best in that field. It gave professional users almost all of the tools they needed where they could quickly get to them. I remember some real dogs out there like Macromedia XRes, and the Fireworks interface was crap for its first few versions as well (now it's OK as I know my way around).
Sure, new users and hobbyists futzing around with a pirated copy are going to get lost and frustrated, but they aren't the target audience anyways. It's like complaining that the Airbus isn't as easy to use as a single-seat propeller aircraft.
First GIMP has to clumsy intallation. To compeet with PS it needs to be simple and stable. Second there is no support for CMYK in GIMP and that's why Gimp is mostly useless. Ok for some web graphics but the story ends there.
I'm getting just a little confused by all these acronyms.
IIRC, most of the commercial influence behind VGML and SVG was the fallout of the pissing contest between Adobe and Macromedia. It's disappointing that the uptake of SVG hasn't been better. Maybe Adobe plans to do something about that. Anybody can do PDFs but Adobe is the PDF company. SVG development tools are a ripe market, and I'm sure Adobe would like also to be the SVG company. FOSS tools like Inkscape and Dia have a long way to go.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Looking at the wording of your post, I got the feeling you must be in a PR or marketing department. Your use of phrases such as "I am excited about the prospect of Adobe developing Macromedia's assets" and "The artistic feature set of Flash" sounds for all the world to me like the press releases those departments would release.
I know it's just my paranoia, but I was wondering how Adobe would react to the largley negative reactions to this buyout, and one of those might be the old trick of astroturfing.
I just thought it was interesting - about a month ago a tech specialist wondered aloud why MS hadn't bought Macromedia yet? He said they currently use Flash internally and plan to use even more of their tools down the road, so to him it seemed like such a natural fit....
I dunno, maybe there's some truth (or just blind speculation) in what Dvorak is saying.
"Try to look unimportant; the enemy may be low on ammo."
Paint.NET is also a formidable photo-editing and drawing app on non-professional desktops with a much more user-friendly interface than The GIMP and has features that echo Photoshop.
The price is also right (free).
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
My concern is that eventually, live Flash content will be insertable into PDFs. Java is already there.
That means, when you download a seemingly innocuous PDF file, a Java or Flash object can be used by the PDF's author to open a pop-up window (or other nuisance) without being intentially invoked by the user.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
Neatly summed up by Daring Fireball
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It seems that Macromedia has done a much better job of keeping up with Linux that Adobe did. It is only recently that they caught up with support for their Acrobat Reader for Linux. It used to lag one or two versions behind their Windows versions.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
We bought a company out of fear and called in Macradobe!
I know that somebody can figure out more lyrics on this. It is 4/20 after all.
The second line doesn't fit the tune at all!
PDFs are almost exclusively used today as a read-only format (or maybe fixed content with editable forms). Until that changes, which would require Acrobat to become useable as an editor, there's only a very fine overlap. You can download both PDF and word document readers for free as in beer.
I bookmarked it... it's an excellent tip!
Originally posted by Mister Transistor (259842) on Monday April 18, @10:19AM (#12269700)
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!
Dvorak wont change .... just like his keyboard
Eventually corporations will start working in PDF directly, rather than farming out the PDFication of data to a specialist department. They will start liscencing Framemaker to all its staff.
Framemaker was an acquisition so Adobe is slowly killing off Framemaker. They have not released a Mac OS X version, the Linux port was killed after releasing a working beta, and the Windows version has gained basically zero features in the last several years. They would cancel it today if not for the thousands of users who would migrate to Quark.
"Bring out the GIMP."
"The GIMP's not installed."
"Well, I guess you'll have to compile it, won't you?"
That fix is also described in MozillaZine.
An even better solution is to uninstall Adobe's Reader, and install FoxIt PDF Reader, which is free.
The download (zip) file is less than 1 MegaByte, so it can be downloaded even over a slow dial-up connection. By comparison, the download for Adobe Reader is about 15 MB - 20 MB.
The entire installation for FoxIt PDF Reader takes up less than 2 MB of hard drive space. Adobe Reader takes up about 60 MB. I don't know what Adobe Reader used the other 58 MB for, but I don't miss it. FoxIt PDF Reader loads much faster.
Major thank you! This is amazing -- alot of my is done with Acrobat and this is awesome.
Totally agreed! PDF is an amazing tool for print designers. It is really the only feasible way to send stuff to printers without too much worry (other than the fact that all printers are twits! ;-) about the final result. A godsend, actually.
Not that he's the brightest bulb, but there's a real symptom here that can cause headaches.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .
I hadn't noticed. Someone else at work noted that their flagship products are complementary, and I'd have to agree. I mean, Acrobat is useful, while Shockwave and Flash...ahem...I mean, Adobe is all about sticking things precisely in place, while Macromedia's forte has been getting them to fly around. Documents vs. movies. Substance vs. style, in my view.
From the blurb; According to John Dvorak...
Man, who gives a damn what Dvorak says. How often have slashdotters and many others moaned about this guy being either useless or plainly wrong? Off with him.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
The apparent necessity of renaming and copying parts of the Acrobate Reader plug-ins folder seem to imply that Windows is causing the problem. The problem could be intentional like the broken HTTP, TCP/IP, Kerberos, and telnet protocols used by Windows. Or it could be an honest bug that they are intentionally not getting around to fixing.
It can't be Flash as they're coming out with their own. It can't be ColdFusion as they have asp.net. It can't be Dreamweaver for obvious reasons. It can't be Breeze, Flex or anything else. Why would MS buy MM except to destroy it or keep it out of the hands of others? Not only do I disagree with Dvorak but his comment about Flash shows his bias. All he's looking at is the negative, not any of the positives that MM might bring to the table to make the deal more than a 'get it before MS does'.
Michael Dinowitz House of Fusion http://www.houseoffusion.com
I know. I use both every day in my work as a writer. In general:
Word is for short, free format documents (memos, executive summaries, etc.). Do not attempt to use Word for long documents (200+ pages) or where consistent format across the document is important (in other words, the broken lists will screw things up). There are work-arounds for Word's long-document flaws, but most are more trouble than they're worth.
Frame is for book-length documents (200+ pages) where page layout and consistent formating are important. Using Frame for one page one-off documents is more trouble than it's worth. The learning curve is a little steep at first (for Office users) but Frame's model makes sense and once you get it, it becomes very easy to use.
Personally, I use the appropriate tool for the appropriate job. If I need a fax coversheet, I use Word. When I'm writing a 500-page Admin Guide, I use Frame. In my opinion, the overlap between the two tools is limited. Again, I use both on a daily basis.
Totally agree that Word docs on the 'net are a sign that someone doesn't know what they're doing. Aside from the fact that Word docs can contain macro viruses, since the format isn't "fixed" in the same way as PDF, it's almost a sure thing that the person viewing the Word document isn't seeing the same thing that the person who wrote it saw.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
It's premature to conclude Adobe is killing off Framemaker. Adobe is still flogging Frame as a batch automated work-flow solution to editing and printing structured files (XML/dbase). Frame is a pretty high-maintenance path to converting XML files to print but a network of consultants support Adobe's marketing and I would be very surprised if Adobe intends to kill Frame off.
Plus there are many different standalone PDF readers out there for MS-Windows, Linux, OS X, and so on. MS-Word doesn't have a standalone reader except on ... MS-Windows. And if you already have MS-Windows, MS-Office is probably already on the machine.
PDF's can even embed metadata, which is a great bonus for locally searching your collection. e.g. Finding all documents of a particular author, or in a particular project, or about a particular topic.
The big drawback to PDFs is that it is not practical to re-edit them. But then that's not what they're for. They're essentially paper that hasn't come out of the printer yet.
For editable documents, the industry looks to be moving towards OpenDocument, which is a vendor-neutral, open, royalty-free, XML-based file format being shaped up by OASIS. All the big (and many of the small) international names in electronic publishing are members in OASIS. OpenDocument is being supported and encouraged by the EU as well and will be the main format for OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, AbiWord, Kword, and others. Google already indexes it.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The original article said Adobe only worries about Microsoft. Well, that's because Adobe apparently idolizes Microsoft & want's to be the next Microsoft, starting out first, of course by buying up great companies, sucking innovation of of them, and sticking DRM on the products & getting us all to report others who aren't doing things the Adobe Way.
Adobe's turning into the most fu***d up company ever.
Maybe you'd like to know thing one before you create a fictive publishing history for the man based on what you want to believe?
Dvorak's famous original response to the introduction of the Mac in 1984 was that nobody had any proof that users would use a mouse, for chrissakes. So, you know, your "was a huge Mac fan" and "was largely correct in his analyses" statements were completely vitiated at the very first opportunity the man had to prove himself...
This guy's been a trash columnist for his whole career, always, and he's always had a particular grudge against Macs. He used to publish a column on the back page of either Macworld or MacUser magazine, as a kind of "counterpoint" -- in which every dang column was a rant against Apple and the Macintosh. It played very much like the sports columnist in your local paper who lays into the management of (fill in team name). This is strictly a profit thing; basically that sort of column does, as someone else pointed out, boost circulation like any troll post, and so the magazine ran him for a while and he was happy to print the dreck and cash the checks.
The other consistent note that Dvorak's sounded, always, is a sort of wannabe-neighborhood-bully line in favor of whoever appears to be the most powerful presence on the market. He positively adored IBM back in the day; that old column was full of stories about how great the PC was for so many reasons. When MS gets roundly criticized for something now you can count on Johnny to publish a "liberal media conspiracy" sort of argument about how MS is really being discriminated against. The guy sides with those in power, instinctively.
How Dvorak's managed to avoid working for Rupert Murdoch is a mystery. If there's any example of tech journalism being truly tabloid in its tone and general M.O., he's it. It's always seemed possible to me that he and Bill O'Reilly are actually the same person...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I've been using Acrobat Speedup since Reader6.0 came out.
. ph p
It has a nice user interface and you can manually edit which plugins you want activated.
http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/prods/misc/index
Why Did Adobe Buy Macromedia?
I'll answer that question with an analogy.
Q: Why do dogs lick their balls?
A: Because they can.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
And in other news, everybody who knows would like everybody else to know that John C. Dvorak is still a moron.
A community-oriented lyrics site
Frame is a pretty high-maintenance path to converting XML files to print but a network of consultants support Adobe's marketing and I would be very surprised if Adobe intends to kill Frame off.
They already have for Mac users, which comprised a fair number of their customers. In InDesign CS they added the XML processing and authoring features. Now in CS2 Studio they have spun the XML features into a seperate product called InCopy.
I was advised by a former employee that if I wanted to choose a new layout application to avoid framemaker because it is dead there. Having seen what has happened over the last few years has pretty much confirmed this. Sorry, a lot of us know that InDesign does not cut it, and nothing really stacks up to the features in Framemaker for several markets, but I seriously doubt Adobe is going to magically pull their collective heads out of their butts and save it. Start looking for alternatives.
The article paints Adobe's (apparent) culture of innovation like it's a pathological disease. As if the drive to improve their products without the 'Hammer of Impending Doom' hovering over their heads were some kind of disorder...
... excuse me ... paranoid attitude of Adobe's Management. InDesign is beginning to get traction because it really is that much better than Quark 6... It was better at v1.5, better @ v2 - and better still at v3 (CS) ... and even the hidebound print industry is beginning to sit up and take notice.
Isn't this exactly what we criticize MS for not doing? Shouldn't we be ecstatic to find a company where the leadership 'stays awake at night' coming up with ways to make their product better... and not just 'adding a nth blade to the razor' better, but honest and for true new and better features? Isn't that the way business is SUPPOSED to work? Have we reached a point where mediocrity is the gold standard, and pursuit of excellence is considered a defect?
Not to mention that there is, in fact, more happening at Adobe than running away from MS. InDesign is a clear and effective shot across the bow of Quark Systems... You remember Quark? The most customer hostile company on the planet, and a classic example of the 'milk and coast' attitude Dvorak mentions... or do you REALLY think adobe was targeting Publisher with this product?
Getting anything through the print/design industry is like pouring molasses at midwinter, but even so, inDesign is *beginning* to make an impact precisely because of the driven
As far as the results of the merger, I really don't know yet. It is certainly a better one than many I've seen go through in the last two years. Product overlap is minimal, both companies are already successful in their chosen markets... if Adobe is smart, they'll keep Dreamweaver and salvage what they can of GoLive to add to the product. Other than that it mostly just creates a larger product line for Adobe. If adobe is able to extend its commitment to excellence/paranoia to Macromedia, and manages to not alienate the impressive developer community that comes with it they have a chance to do some genuinely cool stuff.
I'm certainly not as scared of 'Macrodobe' as I am of Peoplesoft/Oracle - apples and oranges, I know, but that one wakes <i>me</i> up at night in a cold sweat.
you've gotta know that from the service side of the industry(prepress, advertising, service bureau, kinko's, etc) blending these two companies will relieve a LOT of headaches.
remember back when there were three heavies competeing iin the graphic art market:adobe, aldus, and quark. aldus and quark were neck and neck with pagemaker and xpress, while adobe languished behind with framemaker(which it acquired thru acquisition)... adobe literally save pagemaker, and was able it itegrate many of it's best features into the "quark killer" indesign. granted, it's been a long time since seeing the first previews of indesign until its recent adoption by the creative market to replace quark. it'll still be a few years before Id offsets quark as the defacto pagelayout software, but the tides are definitely turning. you'll also remember at the time of the merger, adobe was not allowed to incorporate freehand into illustrator because of a potential monopoly on bezier drawing applications, hence macromedia acquiring freehand at that time...
since the adobe/aldus merger, there have been mini-holy wars between illustrator and freehand for features and capabilities, many which were just silly oneupsmanship features, and not real upgrades and enhancements to improve the products at all. in fact, it's my opinion that during these feature wars between illustrator and freehand that features were included that have caused really weird problems which required postscript to be adjusted itself to handle new issues, for example transparency problems within blended items/vignettes. this has caused a bloat in both postscript and pdf standards which are still being fixed in the seperation area.
eliminating freehand will allow illustrator to concentrate on being refined as the premier vector art tool, without the silly catch up games the two were playing. it'll also force many graphic artists/designers to standardize on illustrator, making the seperators job alot easier(opening competing files within competing apps was never really compatible).
as far as golive, there's no doubt in my mind that it'll be better off going away in favor of dreamweaver with stronger ties into illustrator, photoshop/imageready, and indesign. director and it's subvarient products will probably end up blending well with the premiere applications... code bases maybe different, but general algorithms for transformations are the same, just look at transformations between PS and the gimp... what makes a function standout is the UI, and it's those pieces which will be chosen as best of breed, lifted and placed into the best application.
three can keep a secret, if two are dead - benjamin franklin
since people use what they learn, and Adobe has an educational sock puppet called Art Institute International (and supplies software for hundreds of other schools) these kids will grow up to use what they learn, and if they learn the Adobe System, they will use the Adobe System, and that will be on MS Windows.
You are EXACTLY correct that Adobe was (and is) afraid of Apple. Too bad Apple was beaten to the punch in collecting MM...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
microsoft can play this game but others can't? ok........
SCREW YOU ADOBE!!!
Those slimey, aged, dusty, low-ball retards, will only screw up everything. This sucks.
Why did Adobe buy Macromedia? Not because they were scared MS would get it...They bought it because they were scared of Macromedia.
> Why would Microsoft want Macromedia? Lets run through Macromedia's product line for a second:
.NET platform, why would they need these?
.NET, why on earth would it need yet more?
> * ColdFusion, Flex, Breeze, etc. - Server side scripting and application servers. Microsoft has IIS and their
There are a fair number of CF developers out there. Migrate them all to ASP.
> * Flash and related client-side technologies - Microsoft is bringing out Avalon, a graphical engine for developing Internet applications without needing a web browser, so they don't need this.
You're joking, right? There are more users of the Flash 6 plugin than there are IE. Furthermore, Avalon has the fatal flaw of only working on WinXP and Longhorn, which will keep developers using Flash in order to reach the small, but significant Mac community.
> * Dreamweaver and other editors - Microsoft focuses its development platform solely behind Visual Studio
Because Frontpage is an abomination. Microsoft courted Macromedia earlier and Dreamweaver was the sole reason.
> So, to put it simply, Microsoft had no reason to buy Macromedia.
Uh, you couldn't be more wrong. Buying Macromedia would finally give Microsoft access to the design community, something they've been totally incapable of acheiving on their own.
I predict Microsoft will come in and make a hostile bid for Macromedia. It's too cheap a deal for them not to.
The fix is at Simon's Win32 Cheat Sheet
Just had a look at the micro$oft digital image suite after other posters claimed it was as good as photoshop elements, and the demo is in Flash :-)
I've created whole websites in Flash. Having plumbed the inner workings of JavaScript, HTML and Cascading Style Sheets I concluded that for anything complicated, it was easier to do it in Flash. And, if you know what you are doing, the file will be smaller than HTML. Web standards take a lot of testing on other browsers and versions and you still can't guarantee what the user will see.
With Flash, most people just look at the annoying ads--but that is the annoyance of advertising. Flash is a tool to engage and annoy. But it is also the best tool for the web.
Other than the various specialty and video/graphic plugins on browsers, really 90% of what you need to display specialized content is contained in Flash and Acrobat. If you combined all the best of both, the browser becomes merely a container for the Media file. Flash remoting and other tech allows stand-alone apps that don't even need the browser. The browser is useful to take you to content--but really sucks (as far as the non-standard standards and poor object models it uses) in actually displaying content. You can just look at all the download and browser accelerators out their to realize how there is a lot of room for improvement on how browsers packet and deliver information to users.
Flash has better compression and PDFs are much easier to create than decent HTML-based web pages. The only true downside to PDF+Flash that I can see is reorganizing content to fill the screen (a programming issue--but doable for some). So, just as JAVA was a threat until Microsoft polluted it, the upcoming Flash+PDF platform can make the browser obsolete. Once banks realize that they could create user content that was more secure, faster to download (you can store and share library elements and build whole interfaces and graphics out of code), and easier to debug, then they will quit depending on buggy HTML and web-based code and just do it all in Flash.
Of course, the inertia of human habits is usually the strongest factor in human decision making. As all the Slashdot geeks know, what really separates Geek from non-Geek is all about a fear of learning new things. The Acrobat PDF standard, however, is pretty well embraced by the business community. Allowing geeks to enhance PDF files without interfering or confusing non-geeks might be the magic ticket for adoption. I definitely think Adobe must have thought long and hard about human factors. Flash Paper would improve compression in Acrobat files. I could also see separate Libraries for content and code to enhance acrobat on client-side solutions. Especially with sites a user will visit more than once.
But watch Microsoft as they buy up similar companies and perhaps dependent technologies (Like Sorenson) to hedge this threat. They've been wanting to create their own TCP-IP protocol for years -- claiming that it was the real issue with web security rather than ActiveX+VBscript. I wouldn't be surprised if they use a third party company to bring a monopoly lawsuit. Not that they might not have a case, but just the pile of hypocrisy that would entail boggles the mind.
Personally, I hope that Adobe sells off FreeHand, Fontographer, and the Adobe version of Flash (forget the name) so that this marketplace still sees competition.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
All these Microsoft technologies have better alternatives available for less money from other companies. The MS advantage has been that they have parlayed off of things that businesses know and relatively trust (Windows and Office Apps) to extend into server applications.
.NET and IIS are pretty good, but not indispensable. Of course, if you make a living using them--you will think the ARE the web. That was the "Human Factor" I've been referring to.
I cannot see a good alternative for Flash or Acrobat. And from my point of view, too much has been made of server side programming-- other than database activities, most of the programming that web master do could be on the client side in Flash. It's just been an issue of human factors that the programmers ended up controlling everything on the back end. There are pro and cons for client and server solutions, but really these choices are the inertia from who has control.
Avalon is a market dream at the moment. Microsoft will probably come out with it to play catch-up with Adobe at this point. But they have a history of announcing "Me To" products and half the time they never ship if the competition flounders (and sometimes the Vapor-ware projects are to reduce the purchase price of the company in question).
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
I don't have to read a Dvorak article to know he is Full oF $hit. Under "Full of $hit" on wikipedia, he get a good mention as an example.
Previous post to this one makes the common mistake of saying "Flash is just an application to make those annoying web ads". This is like saying; "TV is just an annoying vehicle to distribute obnoxious advertising -- and propaganda". Listen, all the money is in annoying people and propaganda. Why do you think Dvorak has a job?
I think the previous post has a point that Adobe bought Macromedia because Flash (especially Flash Paper) could make Acrobat unnecessary. But I think that would be an up-hill battle for Macromedia to produce a postscript interpreter for flash that would work as well as Adobe's Acrobat. But it still is a factor.
I would disagree and say that Adobe had to be very afraid of Microsoft buying Macromedia (God knows, I was). If that happened, I'd give up web development and make documentary videos or build ponds.
The third reason--and I think it is some of all of these points--is that Macromedia's products are very complimentary with Adobe's. Where they overlap, well, that is where they have both spent money competing.
Expect to be charged more for future upgrades or even (gasp) per use fees.
I don't know what version of NT was installed (I wasn't admin) but the system couldn't run my processes because it was spending all the time idle. Yes, it stayed idle while my processes wait.
Rethinking email
Wow, earlier this year I was debating this very topic. If Adobe bought Macromedia or vice versa. The idea that Photoshop and the Dreamweaver suite were bundles and had better interoperability. Cool, but I wished the buyout was the other way around.
Party at O'zorgnax's Pub! Buy me a Slurmtini aye?
Adobe just wants to piss people off even more by making fun stuff ,like flash games, load REALLY slow and use up alot of system resources too.
the items you listed are exactly why they DID have a reason to buy macromedia. it's called "buying out the competition". duh!
I, for one, am extremely glad that Adobe snatched up Macromedia before M$ did. I love working with Flash, and Dreamweaver is heads and shoulders above Frontpage. However, My main concern was that if MS had gotten to it, they would have fracked up something really good for everyone. HotGarbage
Decaffeinated coffee is kinda like kissing your sister.
That's the second time someone has recommended that to me. That, however, is a function of Adobe's shit design of the reader, and as an end-user of their product I SHOULDN'T HAVE TO FUCKING DO THAT! And certainly if I am distributing an important document that I want people to read quickly, I'm not going to send along a little note to delete useless plugins -- I'll just encode my document in a format that doesn't suck ass.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Why oh why is there a reader plugin for all these web browsers? Why does the Onion release its archived news as PDF? Meant to be viewed in the browser?
I don't even get why people are comparing PDF to Flash animations
Because Adobe, maker of crap technology, has just bought a wonderful technology, and it's highly likely that they will ruin that technology with whatever toxic corporate mentality they try to graft onto it.
Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
I think that Adobe is killing FrameMaker because the code has gone out of control. It has become extremely costly to maintain and add features to FrameMaker.
Microsoft Word's code was also close to go out of control. For example, according to a Microsoft employee in his article Anatomy of a Software Bug, Word's architecture was really not made for multiple undo/redo. Reading the article restored my belief that there are good programmers at Microsoft, after all. Apparently adding multiple undo/redo was a sort of design stunt that few programmers could have performed. Microsoft spent a huge amount of effort to maintain Word.
It is interesting to look at the progress made by Photoshop and Illustrator over the years. It very much seems that Illustrator is taking the same path as FrameMaker did. Illustrator is not receiving enough care. Curve editing is a pain in Illustrator, it doesn't have the level of usability of Photoshop. Consistency between the two products is broken in many places. Photoshop feels way ahead of Illustrator.
Eventually, the list of features to be fixed or re-designed in Illustrator will grow so big that Illustrator will come to a dead-end, also.
I forgot to say... "Hello Seeker! Now don't be afraid, because there's a seeker born every minute..."
:)
From another Firesign Fan!
I've dealt with one diploma mill and their product. The AII is one of those that in generally laughed at. The one I have personal dealings with is Full Sail in Orlando. If you wish to be taken seriously, stay away from the Art Institutes and Full Sail. (This excludes the Art Institute of Chicago.)
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.