Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005
dennison_uy writes "Adobe Systems Incorporated and Macromedia, Inc. today announced they have either received or been notified they will receive all regulatory clearances necessary to complete Adobe's pending acquisition of Macromedia. The companies expect to close the transaction on December 3, 2005. Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?"
I have my own personal bets about what will be going, but of course, that's from my own perspective. From what the majority of analysts say, yes, Freehand will likely go, as will GoLive.
Much speculation exists regarding Fireworks vs. Photoshop. Photoshop will, of course, stay. What I wonder about is whether or not ImageReady will go. If they could merge some of the features of Fireworks into Photoshop, it would be a fabulous product. I've never liked ImageReady to export photos for the web, and I've not liked using Photoshop for creating simple graphic elements for online either. With enough support, Fireworks may stick around by itself, even.
While I've consistently used products from both companies, and many an employer will likely reap an initial cost-savings from the merger, I am sad to see that competition in this industry has faded. I don't think even a company with as much cash to burn as Microsoft can break in any time soon. However, the tools themselves are pretty well set, so I think the next cool thing will be modifying the user interfaces to be even MORE user-friendly and intutitive. Go GIMP and bring on some competition!
Linux - because it doesn't leave that Steve Ballmer aftertaste.
Macromedia and Adobe both have histories of understandably bundling some of their related/popular products together into sets with rather high price tags so that we consumers can gag over the steep prices, and then wheedle our bosses into thinking that yes, we do need Flash MX Professional (while all of your fellow web designers sigh with disdainful looks).
One would expect some sort of bundle to pop out of this merger that would combine Adobe and Macromedia products...anyone have any ideas on what it might include? Anything you can think of aside from the "obvious" suspects? (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator)
___ In the words of Gen. Douglas McArthur: "I'll be right back."
With everyone commenting about the art tools, I have to wonder what Adobe's plans are for ColdFusion. I know that the official line is "CF is selling very well, so they have no reason to dump it." I'm not sure if I put that much faith in Adobe's common sense.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
will bring us more:
- more PDFs on web pages
- more Flash on webpages
- more Flash in PDFs
- more PDFs in Flash
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
FreeHand has been dead for a year now. The entire development team in Richardson. TX was disbanded in March 2003. Everyone was laid off (including me), Development was moved to Bangalore, but that effort was axed after 10 months or so without any results. No wonder, our codebase was exceedingly convoluted.
A shame really. The FH development process was a fine example of how things were supposed to be done. Proper bug tracking, competent managers (no, I was just a grunt developer), plenty of testers, proper specs. One can argue with the actual features and the archaic nature of the multitude of settings but the process was good. The latest release has unfortunately not held up well on OS X though.