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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.)""
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.
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.
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
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.
What speculation exactly are you referring to?
Because I get the idea from your message that you think the article speculates that Microsoft is talking about buying Flash. If so, you rather completely missed the point, in multiple ways, and your accusation of failing to justify non-existant assertions reflects poorly on you, not Dvorak.
Your message is so muddled that I can't make out what is being marked Insightful by the mods (which itself says it probably isn't terribly insightful) seeing as how there's no word about Microsoft planning purchasing Macromedia, unless it is the Slashthink Dvorak bashing getting the mod. In that case, I'd say sure, Dvorak has a crappy track record when it comes to predicting the future, but his explanation of this move makes as much sense as anything else I've seen; I've yet to see a coherent reason for this purchase, and I've seen several intelligent and informed people express confusion.
(Another possibility is that you somehow think that because you think that Microsoft can't possibly be interested in Macromedia, that Adobe can't possibly think that either, and that's not Insightful, that's just plain idiotic. Regardless, I can't find the "Insightful".)
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.
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.
Yup, he really said that
OH SHIT... SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS is EATING 100% of my CPU !?!? Gotta run.
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
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?
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.
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
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.
Welcome to a John Dvorak article, it's all made up and he gets paid a fortune to do it... Oh, and he kisses Microsoft's ass a lot.
Quoting Dvorak on Slashdot should be like quoting Fox News at a DNC meeting - shouldn't hold any water
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
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
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.
writing the craziest shit he can think up, that's what. Metcalfe (an original developer of ethernet at Xerox PARC) did the same with his "Open Sores" anti-Linux article.
.
All you've done with your comment is demonstrate your deep, long-lived denial of certain valid points. To a whole bunch of people the 'open sores' article wasn't 'the craziest shit he could think up.' Rather, many people saw it as Metcalfe pointing out the emperor's lack of a wardrobe.
Anyhow. .
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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!
I personally like the idea that no matter what computer you open a PDF with, it will look the same (unlike Word, which sometimes doesn't even look the same from one PC to the next using the same version of Word, ugh). PDF forms are becoming more common now, which considering Word's weaknesses in this area, is a good thing.
at work, we've used PDFs to share files with restrictions (printing and editing disabled, password protection, etc). PDFs are an excellent way to make sure that the people you're sharing with see the documents exactly as they're supposed to look.
+$0.02
I saw it on Slashdot, it must be true!
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.
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.
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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.
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.
Wasn't Framemaker the basis for Indesign???
I wish. Framemaker is designed with technical books and manuals in mind and is by far the best tool for writing them. InDesign is 100% designed for making magazines which is obvious to anyone who has tried to use it for a book. Auto layouts are weak, auto numbering and versions are basically nonexistent in comparison, auto cross-references don't exist, conditional text is completely missing, style mappings within a document and from imports are buggy and unusable, and long document support is very poor.
Since Adobe killed Framemaker for the Mac I know a number of professionals who had to switch to Windows and a number who just run a really old version in the Classic environment. I'm sure InDesign is a godsend for magazine publishers, but is is piss poor for technical writers. Quark is actually a better option in many cases.
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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