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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.)""
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
exactly anonymous coward.
I was going to write my take on it but a blogger by the name of Jesse Ezell has already put it very nicely. Here's the text of his blog entry:
My Thoughts on the Adobe-Macromedia Deal
It is pretty clear from the acquisition that Adobe is going to be making a major push into web media. They have tried a few times with tools like InDesign and LiveMotion to make some progress, but Macromedia has been extremely successful at fending off their attacks with Dreamweaver and Flash. As a result, Adobe has been able to rule the desktop publishing market and Macromedia has been able to rule the web content market. The mix of the two companies is going to make one hell of a powerful media creation beast. Ok, but that is the obvious stuff. Obviously anyone who buys out Macromedia wants Flash, because Flash is what Macromedia is all about. What else might this mean?
If you look at Macromedia's actions over the past year or so, it seemed pretty likely that they were looking for a buyer. They were gradually buying up smaller companies to add to their arsenal and make themselves more attractive to potential buyers. Choosing eHelp and Presedia as acquisitions tells me that perhaps Adobe is interested in making some moves into the super hot eLearning market. Right now, all Adobe really has going for them is PDF--which is a pretty darn valueble assest, but is really more suited for the web of the past than the web of the future. PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days. The next generation web is all about media, and that is where Flash comes into the picture. eHelp and Presedia were two companies in the front of the eLearning pack, and the timing of these two acquisitions is just too close to mean nothing. However, this also means that eHelp / Presedia customers are in for even more fun as their products all get jumbled up in yet another acquisition. Even Macromedia didn't continue to support all of eHelp's products...
For designers, this acquisition is definately a good thing. They get the best of both worlds as Macromedia and Adobe tag team anyone who attempts to challenge them. Developers, on the other hand, may not have it so lucky. What is to become of Cold Fusion? What about Flex? One of my long-standing complaints about Macromedia is that they don't understand developers. Surely this isn't going to be helped by Macromedia merging with an even more designer centric company. I definately trust the management at Adobe a bit more than Macromedia's management, but you can't help but realize that Adobe really doesn't have a lot of experience with developer centric software. Personally, I would have much rather seen Microsoft acquire Macromedia and give us some kick-ass next generation web tools, but they are too focused on Avalon and XAML right now, so we'll have to leave that to the Xamlon guys or get everyone running Avalon so we can deliver the stuff natively.
In any case, one thing is certain, watching this play out is going to be very interesting.
[end]
--
Fairfax Underground: Fairfax County chat and discussion forums, with an underground twist
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.
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."
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
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
What BS!
They've both been developing for Macs forever, Adobe was born writing software for the Mac platform, Macromedia (as Macromind) arrived on the scene several years later AFAIK. Either way, that experience probably counts for jack shit in developing for MacOS X.
Check your facts* before posting please....
FCPro, when released was not competition for Premiere. At the time, it was concieved as a broadcast video and film editing product, competing in the market with Avid and other specialist vendors. Permiere may have come a way since then, but back then, Adobe decided that rather than spend to bring it to X, and have to compete against / bring it to the standard of the OS vendor's own offerings (FCPro) that it would withdraw from the Mac market in video editing. There is approximately zero-chance that Adobe will be developing another Mac video product. The only product that they make for Mac, After Effects, is the only one with a strong competitive advantage. Another example would be Album, it will never be coming to Mac while Apple make iPhoto.
Tho the article itself is thin on detail, it does try to pose a possible reasoning to the takeover, taht has everyone shaking their heads. People who make their livings using Macromedia's products are understandably nervous... with so many competing products, this sort of thing is bound to result in less choice for users, unless, as suggested on Ars Technica, some sort of two tiered approach to the design product lines is taken, with Macormedia's offerings on the lower tier. It's easy enough, especially in the snobby world of design, to say that everyone uses Photoshop and Illustrator, but Freehand and Fireworks have their fans. And they're agressively bundled with Macromedia's current flagship product, Flash.
In the drive to cut costs after Adobe has dug deep to make this purchase, I'd be more concerned for some of Macromedia's lesser products such as Director & Authorware... that they made money for their precvious owner might not save them, as the bar for acceptable performance may well be raised, given the 2 company's price:earnings ratios. Although having very few competitors in their respective niche markets might count for something...
* I know that Wikipaedia != facts, but i don't think there's much in that particular entry that's opinion
PDF was great when web pages were static, but web pages aren't static anymore and PDFs are boring these days.
I don't understand this at all. Every form I download from my state government is PDF, for example, often the handy fill-in type. That isn't boring, it's damn useful. Most useful documentation on the web is also distributed as PDF.
As for Flash, I don't even have it installed, right now. The advertisements were driving me bonkers!
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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?
Dvorak was a huge Mac fan who became disheartened with how incompetantly Apple was being run in the 1990s. I think he was trying to speak for the silent majority of Apple users, many of whom did abandon the platform in that time period. Unfortunately, like today, the Mac magazines were sold to the fanboy market that rejected any form of dissent. Now that Apple has revitalized itself, the Mac Dvorak-haters should acknowledge that he was largely correct in his analyses.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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