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Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger

Posted by Zonk on from the so-happy-together dept.

Steve Nixon wrote to mention a CRN article discussing the shareholder approval of a merger between Adobe and Macromedia. From the article: "The deal, announced in early April, is slated to close this fall pending government approval. On Thursday, the companies said nearly 99 percent of the outstanding Adobe and Macromedia shares voted were cast in favor of the deal. Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."

41 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. Imagine... by DrifterX79 · · Score: 5, Funny

    that one day soon we will have one company to blame for all those god awful, firefox slowing, IE crashing plug-ins. Not to mention on company to blame for the proliferation of flash adverts...

    1. Re:Imagine... by dnoyeb · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As a programmer, its hard to imagine a design that allows a piece of software I launch to assist my program, crash my program, or bring my program to complete uselessness. This was the standard in windows 3.1 days.

      WTF does acrobat bring IE and Firefox both to their knees. And why cant you cancel it? Why is it allowed to lock up the browser, and every instance of it completely?

      What is wrong with that architecture, and why do both IE and Firefox follow the same flawed model? Or is this some windows architectural thing getting involved?

    2. Re:Imagine... by GileadGreene · · Score: 2, Insightful
      One of the big bonuses to using X is that I have some choices for lightweight PDF readers...

      See also OS X, and the nifty Preview.app

    3. Re:Imagine... by MBCook · · Score: 4, Informative
      I've got to weigh in on this. I switched to a Mac early this year. The Preview application is FANTASTIC. It does everything I need to view PDFs, it's FAST, and works great. I've loved it. Every time I had to use a PC since then with a PDF file, I've been unable to understand why Acrobat reader is so slow.

      Then I installed Adobe CS 2 on my Mac. It came with... Acrobat!

      Well, to be helpful, it nicely replaced Preview as the default way to view PDFs. That meant that if I was surfing and clicked on a link to a PDF, instead of it popping up almost instantly (like another HTML page) as it did before, the WHOLE COMPUTER SLOWED DOWN and Safari almost locked up for a few seconds as it opened. Then when it was open it was slow. VERY slow.

      I quickly found out how to remove the program from Safari's plugins so that it wouldn't cause that again. Acrobat absolutely sucks performance.

      But things get worse. I have to run Virtual PC on my Mac and occasionally have to open a PDF in it for various reasons. Now Virtual PC says my computer is the equivalent of 300 MHz. Launching Acrobat basically locks Virtual PC up for 2-3 minutes as it launches (I let it have 512MB of ram, so that's not the problem) and then trying to USE the program is like when I found a 386 running Windows 95. Sure it WORKED, but I didn't have that kind of time to spare.

      I can understand why Photoshop takes so long to load (although I think it could delay the loading of all those plugins until I trued to use one). But Acrobat is a performance black-hole for some reason I can't figure out.

      So, my response to your questions: This isn't a Windows thing. It's an Acrobat thing. Find a replacement for Acrobat. I love Preview, but there must be something better for Windows too.

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    4. Re:Imagine... by hazem · · Score: 4, Informative

      This article shows how to do "liposuction" on acrobat and make it load much faster by removing a bunch of the plugins. If you lose functionality you need, find the plugin and put it back in the plugins directory.

      http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041

      It works for both the reader and the full acrobat.

      The essence of the instructions are:
              * From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
              * Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
              * Create a new folder named plug_ins
              * Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api

    5. Re:Imagine... by bergeron76 · · Score: 2, Funny

      Let's just hope they don't call the new joint company "AdMedia".

      Or "MacrodobeMedia".

      or... nevermind.

      --
      Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
    6. Re:Imagine... by panaceaa · · Score: 4, Informative

      Or you can upgrade to Adobe Reader 7.0, which loads plug-ins only as they're needed. For me it loads about 5 times faster than the old Reader versions (5, and especially 6).

      --
      my blog
    7. Re:Imagine... by delus10n0 · · Score: 3, Informative

      FireFox has major threading issues anyhow. Go to any website, and start right clicking->'T' (open in tab) on every link you can find. Behold the slowness!

      --
      Not All Who Wander Are Lost
    8. Re:Imagine... by Skuld-Chan · · Score: 2, Informative

      Why do people always take the hard way out? Just go into edit > preferences > internet > uncheck display pdf in browser.

      That little feature has been there since at least acrobat 3 when the first browser plugin came about.

      With 6 and 7 there both package components too - so you can do a msiexec /i acropro.msi (or whatever the package is called) REMOVE=AcrobatBrowserIntegration and your done.

      Isn't windows cool?

  2. One more acquisition... by g051051 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now, they just need to buy/merge with Real, and you'd have a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft.

    1. Re:One more acquisition... by iamwoodyjones · · Score: 4, Funny

      I looked at Real's web site for the merger and it says

      Merger is......buffering......

      Once they do acquire real we can see our pdf's......buffering......

      which might actually be better than that big duff with his arms outstretched and a bazillion plugins loading below him for 1/2 an hour

    2. Re:One more acquisition... by fm6 · · Score: 2, Funny
      Bite your tongue! Two companies with fair-to-excellent software combining with a company that produces crap. Plus they rely too much on ethically questionable marketing.

      Besides, competing with Microsoft isn't a matter of size. It's a matter of getting past Microsoft's control of the basic desktop.

  3. Yes,... just like Microsoft... by FinestLittleSpace · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Apart from the money making obligatory installation of an OS on every machine....

    THAT'S why M$ are huge.

    Adobe and Macromedia already have huge penetration with Acrobat and Flash respectively on 90% of machines, but that doesn't make them close to the behemoth that M$ is.

    1. Re:Yes,... just like Microsoft... by FinestLittleSpace · · Score: 2

      Yep, I do. say the developing tools are £1000 (theyre actually less), that's 5x the cost of windows. There isnt even a ratio of 1:10 of developers to users, it's much less, possibly in the 1:1000s, or even 10:100000s. Therefore they're not recouperating anywhere near the market saturation of marketed products that M$ are. Nearly everyone in the world with a window machine has Office on it, par example.

      I know very very well that Flash especially has a very low dev to user ratio. As an Actionscript 2 coder I'm in HIGH demand because they're actually RARE, and a lot have pirated copies as most flash work is done freelance. There's a good volume of people with pirated copies of Distiller or Flash, but legal? Not really.

  4. With as little information as we've got? by lostchicken · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At this point, there's very little information available about which products will and will not survive the merger. Why would any shareholder approve a merger when all he/she knew was that the two companies were to merge?

    --
    -twb
    1. Re:With as little information as we've got? by Trip+Ericson · · Score: 5, Funny

      It'$ not an ea$y que$tion to an$wer really, but I $uppo$e with $uffiient inve$tigation, we'll di$cover an an$wer.

  5. Graphic Designers are all wondering what it means by deft · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As a designer that uses both companies programs extensively....photoshop and dreamweaver the top 2 right now, I am very curious as to how this will play out.

    My biggest hope is that this will create some real cross program compatibility between all of their native formats. Adobe is very good about making the jump with a file between all of their programs, and I'll look forward to doing that to MM stuff too.

    My biggest fear is the monopoly of programs angle, and losing the magic that made these companies what they are.... the innovation and usability being key.

    I hope they take the best from both and do something great.

    --

    There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
  6. competition by brianopp · · Score: 3, Insightful

    what competition will there be in the market after this?? theyll have the leading animation, photo editing, and web developing suites all in one company!

    1. Re:competition by DrifterX79 · · Score: 2, Funny

      The competition will be much like this. If you want to do anything fancy graphically on the web you will choose MacroAdobe. If you want to have the defacto standard in visual media you will choose AdobeMedia. If you want the number one company for browser plugins required to view half the web...

    2. Re:competition by MBCook · · Score: 2, Insightful
      None, really.

      Dreamweaver could argue MS's bastard step-child Frontpage (which they don't even seem to promote anymore). But for the most part, there are no real competitors.

      Photoshop? What is really up there with Photoshop? Next to nothing. Same with Illustrator. The closest things were Macromedia's products. The only ones that will have some competition left are Adobe's video products that Apple competes against (which exist, as I remember, because Adobe wouldn't port them so Apple made their own).

      There is no competition. This should NEVER get legislative approval, but it will because it will make lots of money for the shareholders and there are programs in competition (even if none of them are in the same league, they exist so they can be listed (We will still have to compete against xxx, yyy, and zzz)).

      --
      Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
    3. Re:competition by robertjw · · Score: 2

      Thing is, Adobe's not buying up competitive products. They aren't attempting to corner the photo editing market, or the html editing market - those are both already more or less monopolized. Adobe's just putting these products under one roof.

      I don't see why this shouldn't get legislative approval, it's not creating a monopoly, just combining two companies that have products that control their market segments. AFAIK, nothing illegal in that.

      --
      Find coupons in Greeley
    4. Re:competition by FLEB · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Well, CorelDRAW is still left against Adobe Illustrator. Photoshop tromps PhotoPaint outright, but for usability and features, DRAW blows AI away. You've also got the lower-consumer-end contender, PaintShop Pro, which Corel just bought out (I think it was) this last year.

      Of course, it sounds like Corel's going to try targeting Draw more toward corporate users, which will further lower printers' opinions of CorelDRAW designers (as inept hacks), even though DRAW has a suprising array of prepress tools and very good native PDF support built in.

      From what I hear (through the rumor mill), Adobe's liable to kill Freehand, among other things, which is another comparable-if-not-greater app to Illustrator.

      --
      Information wants to be free.
      Entertainment wants to be paid.
      You just want to be cheap.
  7. I agree by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."
     
    I agree. The .pdf files and flash crud that have been a blight on the internet for years should be a powerful rival to Microsoft, whose operating systems have been a blight on PCs for years, in the competition to see who can fuck the world up more.

  8. wise tactical move by apt_user · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This can only be a maneuver to prevent microsoft from buying either one of the two companies. Combined they dont necessarily stand to make more money than they would alone, but it creates a united front to keep microsoft out of their media software niche.

  9. Hooray! by nmb3000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Now we can have a Flash ad with an embedded PDF document which plays a RealMedia clip!

    Besides, "a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft"? Um.... Microsoft makes office software and operating systems. They make almost zippo from Windows Media Player. Two big multimedia-oriented companies and a pain-in-the-ass-that-just-won't-die video tech company have what influence on Microsoft?

    --
    "What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
    /)
    1. Re:Hooray! by ozmanjusri · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Two big multimedia-oriented companies and a pain-in-the-ass-that-just-won't-die video tech company have what influence on Microsoft?

      Take a closer look at what Flash is rapidly becoming. It's a platform-independant development environment which is easily capable of being used to develop productivity apps. It has the capacity (with Flash Remoting and Cold Fusion) of becoming the core of a decentralised Office replacement. No dependance on Windows, no need for MS.

      --
      "I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
  10. Normal patterns in a maturing industry by ben_white · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I see this as just normal patterns in a maturing industry. As the technology era matures, the number of significant players decreases. This is happening even faster in the modern era where governments are pulling down barriers to this type of integration in the name of "free trade." There are of course downsides to this pattern. The larger the entity the more difficut true innovation is. True innovation will continue on the fringes of the industry in the smaller startups and by individuals.

    I think our real fear should not be of this kind of commercial merger squashing innovation, but of our screwed up patent system strangling the type of innovation that started the technology and information revolution.

    cheers, ben

    --
    cheers, ben

    Never miss a good chance to shut up -- Will Rogers
  11. And We Shall Call It... by WhiteWolf · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...Macrobe!

    --
    Eye kneed eh Grammer chicken.
  12. Re:counterweight? .. or easier target? by dabigpaybackski · · Score: 2, Interesting
    PDF does have a grip on academic publications, but there are other technologies that can duplicate it.

    Perhaps, but PDF is an open standard, and ubiquitous. Search for a document on Google and you get a screen full of PDF links. You want to download a manual for your new sound card? PDF. You want to print up a corporate shareholder report? It's probably a PDF.

    PDF isn't going anywhere.

    --
    "OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
  13. Insiders report by hobotron · · Score: 4, Funny



    Insiders report they will collaborate on an exciting new standard of interoperability that will lag the complete shit out of your browser.

    --
    There is truth in humor.
  14. Simple by melted · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Adobe vs. Microsoft.

    AFAIK Microsoft is getting their PDF and Flash replacements ready as we speak.

    http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000587.html
    http://www.pdfzone.com/category2/0,1874,1836049,00 .asp

  15. PDF & flash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Honestly, I like PDF. It guarantees the exact replication of how a document is intended to apperar. Almost everywhere.
    That's the main advantage of a typographic file format.

    Oppositely, I utterly dislike flash. I consider it just useless to the user. Only eye-candy here. Not much more.
    Yes, it's interesting from the developer side, with its event controlling script engine and the ability to not be obligated to follow a rigid frame order.
    But still, it's just a waste of resources.

    I'm guessing if Adobe and Macromedia will try to join both or just - as written by someone else - keep 'em separated to prevent the Evil from embrace and extend (to be read as: copy and screw).

    1. Re:PDF & flash by timeOday · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I like flash because my kids like to play flash games on sites like miniclip.com. There has to be some alternative to client-side applications other than blindly installing .exe's. I wish Java had won out, but I guess it was too big and heavy, and took too long to implement little web apps.

  16. Think back... by AdityaG · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Before people rant on how much Flash and pdf's suck, please step back and think.

    Go back to about 5-6 years ago, when CSS and "design" weren't really associated with websites. They mainly consisted of lots of tables and a lot of annoying animated gifs with the occasional embedded music. But there were also the "good" sites that were easy to read, helpful and good on the eyes. If you don't get my point yet.. Flash and the PDF format have a bad name mainly because of their abuse. PDF is really not very bad. If you don't like the firefox plugin, DONT INSTALL IT. Let firefox download the pdf and voila, you have a nice, relatively small and fairly cross platform file. Then we have flash. I have seen Flash being used for a lot of very stupid things, like the ads... but I have also seen it used for some very cool things, like educational games, kiosk presentations and such. They are also being used for things like statistics with things like Flex. And with the new versions, its much easier to make Flash a lot more accessible, including language strings.

    So before you start a large flame... please think of how GOOD these pieces of software are. I am personally very excited about the merger. Maybe they will soon have a Addobe + Macromedia Studio where they will just have Dreamweaver + Flash + Photoshop instead of two incomplete studios (CS and Macromedia Studio)

    Cheers

  17. SVG by chri · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My hope is that this merger does not weaken Adobe's support for SVG.

    --
    greetings earthlings
  18. should save both companies a lot of money by Scudsucker · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...if only because this means they wont be suing eachother on a quarterly basis.

  19. Re:MACROMEDIA CANT PROGRAM X86_64 (AMD64) THEY SUC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can't you just run two instances of the 32-bit version?

  20. Flash Commoditizes Windows by vw_bob · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One thing that surprises me is how most people miss the point that flash isn't just about animation any more. It's a platform! Consider this, ActionScript is a full featured OO language. Flash is installed on almost any computer. Wouldn't this begin to suggest that you could use Flash to create truly platform agnostic web-distributable applications?

    Screw web "pages", the future of the web is about web "applications". Cross platform web applications marginalize (actually commoditize) Microsoft's operating system (and a big portion of it's business model.

    Why do you think MS is working on Avalon?! To tie "rich" internet applications to windows, and not to other OSes like Mac or Linux.

    Perhaps we should all learn Flash and start writing applications in it... this might do something to help knock MS off it's thrown. (Not that I care, but it's something a lot of Slashdotters do care about.)

    1. Re:Flash Commoditizes Windows by vw_bob · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Frankly, I could care less about standards. What I want is reliablity. It's obvious that CSS, E4X, SVG and the rest of that gang havn't met that promise. I'm not saying they won't, but I'm saying that, as a business, I'm not going to wait for things to change.

      I say give me something that works consistently over something that's a "standard" but hardly ever works consistently, or takes so much time to implement consistently that I've already lost the race by the time I finish my application.

  21. Acrobat "light" is ok by Kristoffer+Lunden · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Actually, if you just don't install the plugins package Acrobat is both really snappy and well behaved (this is on Ubuntu). That's why there are tutorials all over the web on how to remove most plugins from Acrobat on Windows. The actual reader is lightweight and nice, it's all those unnecessary extras (including DRM and privacy-invading javascripts that some are so afraid of) that's the bloat.

    It's actually pretty funny that they've designed the application in a good way so things can be removed and added like this, but at the same time seems to want this to be a secret and prefers to tell the users that they need it all. Of course, this is probably just sound marketing strategy from their point of view, and the average user probably rather waits a bit than for something not to work. Not having those plugins installed means that URLs aren't clickable for instance, but I can live with the occassional copy/paste instead - and if I really wanted to, I could manually get that plugin.

    So, Acrobat is really the choice as far as I can tell, even though it's not a good moral or political choice. Sure, there are plenty of other alternatives to choose from under Linux, but so far I've found none that's actually useable unless you only do sequential reading - page by page, from start to end. The few PDF:s I use are usually references and manuals of some sort, or sometimes large design documents. I need the ability to navigate these quickly. Search, bookmarks, ToC, and thumbs all those things are either missing or seriously hobbled in all the alternatives I've tried at least.

    Feel free to inform me of the one I've missed. I can live with crappy rendering, if needs be, but I do need a good UI.

    --
    Spine World
  22. Good! by Guppy06 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Now I only have one corporation to hate on instead of two. This frees up hatred for new and upcoming businesses.