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.)""

Comments

Paranoid? Why not?

[Alarash]

If I were to be the owner of a company that is the leader of its field, I'd worry about Microsoft too. They proved a lot of time that if they want to get into any given market, they can, and the drums will be rolling for them. Because they can afford it. I think the best examples are they behavior when it comes to video games. For some reason, they wanted to create the best flight simulator to date. Boom, they buy flight simulator, throw a few million bucks in the project, and 10 years later, it's still the best flight simulator to exist.

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.

HFS!!!

[Ralph Spoilsport]

I used to work at Macromedia, and I remember a big company meeting at Pajaro Dunes where they Specifically Announced Adobe as their Main Enemy, and then set about acquiring software to battle them point to point.

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

Wrong Again

[BenFranske]

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.

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