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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.
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?
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.
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.
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".)
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."
Yup, he really said that
OH SHIT... SYSTEM IDLE PROCESS is EATING 100% of my CPU !?!? Gotta run.
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.
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.
Anti-Trust. So Microsoft would get PostScript and PDF, the main defenses against
Microsoft buying Adobe would be a dark day for the Internet.
-- 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?
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.
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
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
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.