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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?"
To the tune of Yankee Doodle Went to London
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
That's today you insenstive clod!
I for one live in the future, which puts December 3rd as, well, right now.
Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?" ...it means the end of flash, but I know its just a dream.
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.
How the Adobe-Macromedia Merger Could Impact PDF
Interview of both CEOs
Staff's comments
Article with a bit more bulk on the subject (The article linked about is quite small)
do.what.promptcmds
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."
At what point does consolidation hinder a company's ability to produce and perform?
All these corporate acquisitions have me worried.
With all those great minds together, maybe they'll find a way to make pdf's load in less than half a day. Both companies have great offerings, but Adobe's products are slow with a side of slow and an extra helping of slow...
Unless they buy Corel too and Painter dies. But surely the Valar would intervene in such a case. Boy, the Silmarillion really ought to address this sort of problem.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Why would Adobe eliminate a successful product line with a loyal fan base? Why sell only one product when you can sell two? Cheers, Adolfo PS. There is no competition for Photoshop in the image editing market, but for me, Fireworks remains an indispensable website prototyping tool.
It won't spell the end of Dreamweaver, GoLive or Flash. I'm getting sick of wading through MM_SwapImage() crap in sites I didn't build but have to maintain.
Oh I'm not denying that for a second, I use illustrator 90% more, but, like I said the tracing function of freehand is second to none - hopefully someone at adobe will have the same thought...
I've used Macromedia products since their early days. They used to be cool - a big focus on the developer and keeping everything open. They don't feel so cool these days, they just seem to want to squeeze as much money out of me as possible, and I've started to resent it.
For instance, making a "professional" version of the Flash tool - I'm sure pretty much everyone who buys Flash is a professional, the "professional" version is just an excuse to charge extra for things that should be in the main product.
And they are trying to push developers in the direction they want them to go, rather than providing what developers want. For instance, they have a heavy focus now on using Flash for on-line forms and applications, but when was the last time you actually used a Flash application online? And yet many developers use PHP and are now interested in Ruby and AJAX but Macromedia have very poor support for those technologies.
I would like to think something positive will come out of this merger, but I'm afraid the new Adobe will just use their new powers to try to force developers in the direction they want them to go and find new ways to squeeze more money out of them.
is really not a steaming pile at all. It's the only decent app out there that handles vector graphics as well as bitmapped equally well. It's a godsend for an awful lot of people. Plus, it's much easier to "dive in" than with photoshop for someone who doesn't do much graphics work, but is forced to every now and then.
PNG support is also much better, it produces smaller, better quality files than Photoshop manages to.
I do agree with your comment on freehand however, it is indeed doodooo.
I am NaN
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.
Macromedia should school Adobe on how to do proper Help files. Seriously, for high profile products like Adobe has I have NEVER seen worse built-in "help". Acrobat and Premiere use PDF files. Photoshop and Premiere use clunky HTML pages. Both suck ass. I realize Adobe likes to standardize on cross-platform solutions, but they seriously need to consider proper Windows help file formats, preferably HTML Help 2.0. Their existing HTML help files are already probably 80% of what they need to be for HTML Help 2.0. At least Macromedia provides decent Help. Adobe should take a cue from them. Unfortunately, they'll probably take only Flash and Dreamweaver and toss the rest.
Dood, FreeHand is not at all web-centric. It's gone (far) downhill since ~ v7, but its roots are as firmly planted in print publishing as Illustrator's and I've produced dozens of EPS, PDF and PS files for various printers using FreeHand. Heck, circa Flash 4/5 and FreeHand 8/9 you had to export FreeHand drawings as Illustrator files to get them into Flash at all -- hardly what one would expect from 'a companion for Flash'.
Back in the day, FreeHand was at least competitive with -- and in several respects, superior to -- Illustrator. FreeHand still does multi-page documents (Illustrator doesn't as Adobe wants you to buy InDesign for that), offered better text formatting for largeish blocks of text (or did through Illustrator CS1) and has a much better trace tool, among other things. Its lens fills were pretty spiffy when they were introduced (v8?) too -- Illustrator had to wait another rev before getting transparency.
Of course, MM let Illustrator catch up with -- and surpass -- FreeHand while they futzed about with Flash, and that new UI (sparkle? spackle? dazzle? drizzle? whatever it's called...) is abominable. FreeHand has long since lost its place in my toolbox. But it's not a 'companion to Flash'.
Adobe could've done the same thing, when they bought Aldus. In fact, they kept Page Maker around long enough for them to get InDesign up far enough for them to start pushing that instead.
But how did they deal with Freehand, when they already had Illustrator? Why, they sold it off to someone else, and conveniently enough, they're getting it back again.
So, if they feel that there's a legitimate reason to maintain two seperate programs that do similar things, they'll be likely to slowly change the two until you get to the point where it's easy to jump ship to the one they prefer (basically, make sure that any outstanding features have been migrated to the other product line), and then kill off the old one.
In the case where they're no significant differentiation in capabilities between the two, they may see the benefit in getting some money back by flipping it to some other company.
By the time we're done, Freehand will have seen more company trades than WordPerfect.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
What would be nice is if Adobe starts to integrate their powerhouse bitmap transforming & rendering technologies into Flash.
Actually, Adobe already tried this with Flash competitor called Live Motion. It was a tool that had great potential, but it couldn't make inroads into the market that Flash totally dominated. Adobe admitted defeat and pulled it from market in 2003.
With 2 as 1 maybe they can make Acrobat Reader launch faster or atleast not crash my browser oh btw http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php A nice small pdf reader
But the problem is: nobody wants to work with so many programs. If I don't absolutely need some of those slightly more web-centric features of Fireworks, I'm not going to bother using it when I've already got all of my files open in Photoshop; it's not like it can't compensate for such things.
As much as Fireworks compliments Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I don't think there's really much of a necessity for it if you already have a program that is technically capable of doing everything.
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/
...embedding Flash "things" in PDF files. It would be cool to have a motherboard manual with an interactive Flash diagram of the board. While not exactly useful, it would be neat.
PDF SpeedUp 1.42 (win32)
Not only a fancy way to disable the plugins, it actually removes the splash screen, removes crappy GUI elements (advertisments), etc.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Does this mean that Adobe will speed up the development of a 64-bit Flash plug-in? IMO, that's long overdue.
Yes, this does mean the end of Fireworks and Freehand. Neither have ever been the "professional's choice", meaning Adobe has to justify it's investment in the whole CS2 line over the last several years.
But consumers should benefit from integrated products nonetheless. Let us remember the big interface lawsuits of just a few years ago between these companies. Adobe sued MM over the fact you could configure your interface with floating palettes to look like just like their products, and MM was forced to come up with the whole dockable palettes thing.
what I imagine is going to occur, and what I have held off purchasing the latest MM studio for, is this:
1) Freehand goes away completely, it's already too much like Illustrator to survive.
2) Fireworks gets rebranded as an Illustrator lite, and some of it's rasterization features are taken away. It's made into a lightweight production tool for Flash and Web graphics and given all sorts of hooks into Illustrator.
3) Dimensions returns as a 3D solution for Flash.
M
I was in a meeting with a couple sales people from Adobe. Now, we have to take this with a grain of salt, since they were trying to sell us on a massive document and information management system, but the main reason for the purchase is so that Adobe could have Macromedia's presentation tools for forms and paper management.
Right now, a massive portion of Adobe's income comes from the Acrobat/PDF/LiveCycle products, and it's the part that is growing the fastest. Macromedia had been developing 'Flash Paper' and had done great work on making things usable and portable on mobile devices and more lightweight on more platforms.
Expect to see Flash Paper die, and expect to see some of the Flash plug-in multiple platform technologies be leveraged to provide more and better portability of PDFs.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
That's odd... short of saving at 16bits/channel (which maybe Photoshop can't do - I don't touch that thing), I don't think there are any quality settings with PNG per se; it is a lossless format, after all.
There's a lot you can to optimize PNGs, for example with pngcrush. See Wikipedia's detail on PNG filesizes. For more info on PS's bad handling of PNG, see Photoshop & PNG about halfway down that page.
I am sick and tired on websites that use 30% of my CPU just to show a useless, animated logo, or using Flash menus that can't be searched in or for, and unable of being indexed by search engines, and that break back and forward navigation, or waiting 10 seconds or more when a new page loads just to be shown the intro animation for that page.
How about starting to put content, rather than mere presentation, on your pages instead? I, for one, would almost be happier to see Flash eradicated from the web than to see Microsoft eradicated from the OS market.
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.
heh, I just disabled Flash in my browser because of the intrusive distracting ads that use it. I decided it was worth losing access to the few sites I use (very few) which do use it for good reasons.
I predict that the Macromedia apps will all be allowed to die a slow death, just as the way Adobe has treated Frame Technologies and its product FrameMaker after acquisition. The development will be sent to Bangalore, and the code will rot.
Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?
We can but hope.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
Wow. Someone agrees with me. Weird.
To expand though, it's not just the fact that Acrobat and document management is where income is now, it's that that is where they see the growth. Graphics and the creative market will grow, but only at the rate of the economy. They dominate that market, so they can't get more market share, and that sector isn't exactly outstripping the rest of the economy.
Document and information management is a place where they can really grow exponentially. As far as I can tell, (I'm in government) the PDF tools really hold the most promise of any technology to really save us money, time, and management costs as far as reducing the amount of paper we have to move around. Plus, done right, it can really make things easier and more convenient for our clients.
(Of course, this opinion is my own, not necessarily my employer's)
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
"Does this mean the end for apps that take less than 2 minutes to boot?"
//WR
Sorry to disappoint your faith in groupthink. Flash has legitimate, appropriate uses, such as creating sites that go beyond simple click-to-the-next-page interfaces. Just because it's frequently misused, or because you don't see any value in rich media and want it banned from the web, doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This is because you're only being exposed to "Skip-Intro" sites built by incompetent Flash users that don't know how to code in Actionscript and so are left making movieClips and timelines. Problem is that movieClips, especially invisible ones, CONTINUE to play little blinking animations etc in the background and will hog your CPU. It's important to note that this is NOT a problem with Flash or the plugin, you can put that problem squarely on the head of idiot users.
Macromedia's website is built on 80% Flash content, does your CPU run at 30% + to view it? No. Why? Because they have users that *know* how to build proper Flash animations.
Try viewing a page with 7+ animated gifs and see what happens to your cpu.
Notepad (or any text aditor), standard compliant (x)html and css and... there you go FEAR THE STANDARDS!!! :-P
***Game Over***Insert Coin***
I feel I have to stick up for Dolda2000...
I also thought that most folks here thought that Flash is the single largest scourge on the web. Or to be more precise that its inappropriate use is.
While Flash indeed, as mentioned, has legitimate and appropriate uses, there seems to be far more inappropriate use out there. This seems to grow daily. It's not just the inane moving graphics, it's not just the cpu load from badly designed stuff, it's the damn sound effects that get me. I often browse late at night and sometimes I forget that the volume on my pc is up loud. Nothing more than pop-up windows has made me want to punch my monitor more than Flash pages since I started using the web.
One of the best things for the web is Firefox, because with that you can (and I most surely do) use the Flashblock extension. Nowadays I have to really really need a web page before I turn on the Flash on the page.
Sure, this isn't good news for the few good Flash designers out there but until there is a better alternative or some sort of standards, Flashblock is on, and staying on.
So how, exactly, is email or even the web (especially with the newer Javascript+DHTML ads) conceptually different? Spam and phishing schemes on email (wasn't there some report saying spam makes up over half of all internet traffic?); poorly designed or IE-only webpages, pages with embedded MIDI or mp3 files; etc.
Which is not to say I give Flash a free pass--there is undoubtedly crappy Flash out there. But like any technology, including the Slashdot-friendly iPod, and P2P apps, it has its good and bad uses.
(No, I'm not a Flash developer, nor do I personally know any who are)
We're not going to be pushing for a ban on HTML are we? Because HTML *can* be used for