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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.)""
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.
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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.
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?
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
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.
MS would never fork GIMP. That would require them embracing open source. While Adobe may be a threat to MS, open source is a far greater threat. By supporting GIMP MS would admit that open source software can be made to the same standard as proprietary software and that their TCO arguments are bullshit.
Not going to happen soon.
I get sick of this continual insistence that all companies MUST innovate. Sure they will 'innovate' (if evolution can be called innovation) in the products that they already make. But if they want to make a quantum jump in capabilities or product line, what makes more sense? Investing a large amount of time and money into innovating, or buying a readymade product (and the associated developers etc).
When you go to school to study, say, software engineering, do you rely on text books and work from expert who have already accomplished a fair amount in the field, or do you decide to allocate 10 years of your life to re-thinking everything that has been already done?
Acquisitions and mergers are good from an innovation point of view as well. They give developers (within the company as well as without) new opportunities to truly innovate new features and products, based on a combined feature set. So instead of complaining about companies buying everything in sight, why don't you sit down and have a think about what opportunities the combination of PDF and Flash could bring, and what YOU can innovate?
--KN
Take a look at the latest version of Digital Image by Microsoft...it is rapidly improving and is almost a competitor to the CS edition of Photoshop...almost.
:)
Microsoft has also been trying to keep the "run hungry, everyone else is after you" mentality for a number of years...although I think the beancounters and frustrated managers are starting to take over.
While Adobe may be a threat to MS
How? Microsoft and Adobe are not competitors. They offer products that are completely different. The only real competition at all is between Cold Fusion and ASP, but that's a brand new development and really is a non-issue.
Unless Adobe is going into operating systems and office software or Microsoft is going into graphics design the two companies have pretty close to zero overlap.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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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.
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.
I read an interesting article about software companies. It stated that you can never underestimate a competitor, even if they are not currently a direct competitor, that can put hundreds of millions of profit into the bank every quarter.
What if Microsoft did try to directly compete with Adobe? They WOULD be successful despite their product's quality, they have a massive market grip on the entire software field.
Microsoft does not make amazing software that does things nobody else can. Microsoft provides a massive sales push for any product they decide to develop, which usually is similar to another existing piece of software.
Look at Office vs Wordperfect, Excel vs Lotus, etc.
So, I disagree with Dvorak. You do need to worry about Microsoft, no matter where you are in the software field, if you are a large (read multi billion dollar) company
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
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.
It's been passed off as a joke before, but I think Adobe may really consider embedding Flash or something like Flash in PDFs. When we think about Flash the most ready examples are distracting online games and annoying ads. Really Flash has grown into a multimedia platform. It streams vector and raster graphics, animates, and times sound to it. SVG doesn't have all the hooks for sounds laid out in it's current incarnation (unless there's something in SMIL I'm not up on).
Even if it's not Flash in PDF, they still do control the two most common proprietary formats on the web. They've been pushing SVG, but they will have stiff competition from XAML. Using an established platform like Flash can at least give them a head start when that battle comes (which they're already foreseeing according to Dvorak's article).
more of the same on Twitter.
Unless Adobe is going into operating systems and office software or Microsoft is going into graphics design the two companies have pretty close to zero overlap.
I've been thinking, wouldn't Avalon be competing with Flash and possibly Shockwave?
From the Avalon homepage: "Avalon provides the foundation for building applications and high fidelity experiences, blending together application UI, documents, and media content, while exploiting the full power of your computer."
Perhaps Adobe wanted Flash for integration with its products, and though Microsoft might be interested in it because of Avalon?
No it wouldn't. While such a thing would mean that MSFT would be acknowledging that open source has a legitimate place, they could still argue against Linux's TCO. In other words, this would mean that yes they would have to stop attacking open source in general, but that doesn't stop them from claiming that Linux specifically has poor TCO.
I think honestly, Adobe's product line was becoming outdated. Adobe is another company, like Microsoft, which slept on the advancement and the importance of the world wide web. Adobe's latest editions of Photoshop have become more and more emulatory of the corresponding versions of Fireworks, to the point where the two packages had almost become the same thing minus or plus a feature here or there.
That being said, Adobe Illustrator has long been antiquated for the simple reason that if you are going to be involved in desktop publishing, you'd think you'd also be able to somehow do web development all in one. If there were to be such a merge of features from Illustrator and Dreamweaver, one could design an entire site in Illustrator, using Photoshop graphics and export it directly into an HTML package seemlessly. The idea of exporting a webpage made in Photoshop will also probably happen, but since Illustrator is already vector-based and in some ways pre-suited for web use, it has the most capability in this case.
Every company I know saves back to ACAD 2000 so as to have a stable base. 3D is not the panacea that it is made out to be.
Based on my experience, it's really cool to be able to zoom around (very impressive!) inside a model. However, as an old fart designer that runs these nifty 3D visualization programs I have to say that they actually hinder the design process. Why?
Designers need time to focus and giving everyone and their dog the ability to follow progress results in pointless emails asking why things haven't been finished yet. Of course, all these inquiries come from each project manager, project engineer, project specialist, purchaser and janitor. This interrupts the design workflow and slows everything down before anything is really ready to be presented. In the "old days", drawings were hard to interpret, so everyone would wait until there was some sort of finished product to comment on. Maybe an analogy would be hiring a contractor to build a house for you, but you keep showing up every day asking how the finishing on the oak door trimmings is going while he's still framing.
It's not just marketing MS does well. Their products all have a similar look and feel...one the public has both grown used to and feels comfortable with. Their UI has always faired well in reviews as being intuitive and generally easy to use.
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Actually, Adobe's way more worried right now that we're going to Shake them to death.
... though unfortunately I haven't had a chance to see for myself yet. Different group.
Apple has established a track record in recent years of taking pretty decent third-party applications that were not succeeding in the market, buying them, sinking tons of capital into them, and making them industry leaders. We did it with Final Cut Pro. We basically did it with Shake as of the newly released version 4.
If we found a third-party product that does a lot of what InDesign does, bought it, and perfected it, would Adobe have a problem on their hands? Bet your ass they would.
(There are no such plans to do that right now. But that sort of thing can change on a whim around here.)
This had nothing to do with their acquisition of Macromedia, I'm sure, but it most certainly did have a lot to do with their very friendly attitude toward us over the past year. Ever since we first showed them Spotlight last spring and Core Image in the summer of 2003, they've been very attentive to us. I'm told that CS 2 reflects a lot of that
Wow. The commentator on NPR you heard, if he actually said that, was out of his fucking mind.
Web applications work pretty well for ordering pizza. For anything more complicated, they suck. PDF (which has nothing to do with the Web at all) and Flash won't change that.
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.
Basically he said that now, with both client and server applications, Netscape Communications will be well positioned to do a complete end-around Microsoft. With regards to Web apps, Netscape 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 Netscape's products in your web browser.
Others have tried that sort of thing before... I'm not sure it would work out any better for Adobe.
You've obviously not used the Gimp at any great lengths. It's easily got the technology there, if only the idiots running the show would put in some features it is sorely lacking (like layer sets). As for the UI, if you'd ever used Gimp the way it's meant to be used, with with sloppy focus and virtual desktops, then you would see how superior it is to Photoshop, even with a number of fairly major annoyances.
The Farewell Tour II
If I recall correctly, Final Cut was being developed by the former developer of Adobe Premiere. News stories had been floating around for a couple of years about it's development at Macromedia. Suddenly it was sold to Apple and they brought it to fruition.
IMHO, Microsoft's name doesn't factor into this. I think Adobe was more concered with Apple. At NAB, all of the buzz surrounds Apple and Final Cut. While there may not have been any imminent Apple buyout of Macromedia, there is the concern at to what Apple's next move will be.
Microsoft already has some giant brains that know about everything there is to know about making paint programs. They do not need to buy Macromedia for that. (look up the name Alvy Ray Smith and Jim Blinn)
Apple is making a lot of people nervous. I see Avid's purchase of Pinnacle Systems as part of the wake of Apple's move into video editing and effects compositing.
It's mandatory to wash your hands before returning to the land of Dairy Queen.
Place I did consulting for still user R14 with one 2000 box. Why? The draftsman hate new autocad and all recoidled in horror when they saw 2000. The only reason we even had a Acad 2000 box was to open drawings from others and save as r14 or to take r14 drawing that were used internaly and convert them to 2000 for final checkoff.
It's not that they're a threat, it's because they're a leading company in web dev and they have a leading format (flash) for other web content.
Microsoft can't possibly let someone have a lead in web technology.
You've got to be kidding. Why do you think MS Office does _not_ feature PDF-export like OpenOffice?
It's because MS wants the DOC-format to be standard, _not_ PDF. If PDF becomes the standard for reports, resumes, theses etc. Then MS Office will become less important ==> Less used ==> Less bought.
> close to zero overlap.
You're nowhere near to the truth!
They are competitors.
The browser wars wernt about the browser, they were about the file formats, and Microsoft lost. HTML rules the web, and MS Docs on the web are a sign of corporate incompetance.
But now look. see how many PDFs there are out there. 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. When that happens, MS Office starts to become duplicated functionality and will ose market share.
So thats why Adobe and MS are in competion, they both want to be the De-facto web publication format.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
'Familiar' and 'intuitive' are not the same thing.
In the UK the product has failed to hit the top 10 at all. Adobe, meanwhile, has overtaken their REAL arch rival in consumer software, JASC and Paint Shop Pro, because they put an easy user interface on a power peice of software, rather than JASC putting a ridiculously complex user interface on a ridiculously complex paint package.
Microsoft instead chose to put a simple user interface on an extremely basic software package and then charge the same money as Adobe was for Photoshop Elements. I was at a the press unveling of Digital Image 10 and put this to them "How do you expect this to sell when Photoshop Elements 3.0 is out on Monday for the same price?". Microsoft product manager said "Oh, is it?"
It's actually embarassing to see how badly Microsoft's consumer photo/paint software is doing. So you're all kinds of wrong on this issue I'm afraid.
How? Microsoft and Adobe are not competitors. They offer products that are completely different. The only real competition at all is between Cold Fusion and ASP, but that's a brand new development and really is a non-issue. Unless Adobe is going into operating systems and office software or Microsoft is going into graphics design the two companies have pretty close to zero overlap.
It is entirely likely that MS will go into graphics design, layout, publishing, and vector graphics at some point. They already have a number of (horrible) offerings like Publisher. The entire MS business model depends upon constant growth, so they constantly have to move into new areas and leverage their monopoly to kill the existing players.
Aside from that, Adobe threatens MS with several things that currently exist or could be implemented. First, Mac OS support keeps MS from dominating the graphics and publishing markets and provides a good stream of revenue to MS's competitor. Next Linux support for Adobe products would be a huge affirmation of the viability of Linux for the corporate world. Third, HTML from Adobe is still HTML not the pseudo HTML spewed out by frontpage. This is a thorn in MS's side and helps thwart its attempt to hijack the web. Fourth, PDF and several other adobe sponsored open standards threaten MS's lock-in using proprietary formats. These are all reasons for MS to buy Adobe and remove the threat they pose.
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
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.
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.
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