macromedia does need cleaning but yoour reasoning is rubbish even by slashdot standards.
1.fireworks beat the pants off of it's adobe counterpart: imageready.
2.Flash is really just dumbed down Director and as such, you get it or you do not.
3.Freehand has fallen off a cliff since Version 10 - not much quibble there. The important thing is that Freehand forced Adobe to innovate Illustrator.
4.Dreamweaver is clearly capable of producing standards compliant pages - the coding end of it is really just Allaire's HomeSite. You get out what you put in - if you understand standards, standards will come out.
5. Dreamweaver/Fireworks almost single-handedly helped the institution of CSS and the png format.
Macromedia's biggest problem has been quality. Each generation of their software has been successively less stable than the previous version. Once upon a time they were at least as good at Adobe if not better.
Adobe is the Microsoft of the market though-- attention anyone who wants to succeed: corner the business market and the designers will be forced to follow. Microsoft cornered the business world and Apple was left kissing education and designer ass. Now even education and designers are on the microsoft platforms. Adobe focused on PDFs and their overwhelming Photoshop dominance. Business used PDFs exlusively and bought Adobe products to help build them. Macromedia focused on the web designers, essentially eschewing their print market, and now they are kissing Adobe glutes.
Regardless, this is not a Good Thing for the design world.
Had this happened 1 a year ago I would have cried many tears. Macromedia didn't show up at Macworld 2005, their Freehand MX is the buggies thing on the Mac since Word 6 and Dreamweaver for the PC is much better than for the Mac. From a support Apple model things really couldn't have gotten much worse for Macromedia.
Flash and Director are still powerful apps on both platforms, but Adobe doesn't compete in those arenas. People who don't see this as a monopoly are missing the point: You will be completely unable to design (web or print) without buying adobe products. (period, punto, that's it) Yes you will be able to buy Corel, Quark and even use Apple/Microsoft products - but you will not be able to produce a product without going through the world of Adobe.
This is the reason why monopolies are bad. As stated previously, the only reason why Freehand and Illustrator have half the features they do is because they were trying to out-do each other. One of the reasons PDF sucks so bad is cuz it has no real competition. GoLive got killed by dreamweaver, LiveMotion got spanked by Flash, PageMaker gets whooped on by Quark (although Framemaker is the king of it's domain), Photoshop and Fireworks complement themselves better than Photoshop and Imageready do. Macromedia is doing well with Contribute which has no Adobe equivalent.
Don't forget about the audio world - Audition fits nicely with what used to be Sound Edit 16.
This reminds me of the Dell Exec who said Apple was silly for innovating - you lose market share. "Let them innovate" and we'll mass produce it.
There will be no innovation from now on - worse still, expect Microsoft to move into this space with a piece of crap that will satisfy the basic SOHO for $99.
out, t
Props to the Freehand+Illustrator=Frustrator/Illhand jokes.
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macromedia does need cleaning but yoour reasoning is rubbish even by slashdot standards. 1.fireworks beat the pants off of it's adobe counterpart: imageready. 2.Flash is really just dumbed down Director and as such, you get it or you do not. 3.Freehand has fallen off a cliff since Version 10 - not much quibble there. The important thing is that Freehand forced Adobe to innovate Illustrator. 4.Dreamweaver is clearly capable of producing standards compliant pages - the coding end of it is really just Allaire's HomeSite. You get out what you put in - if you understand standards, standards will come out. 5. Dreamweaver/Fireworks almost single-handedly helped the institution of CSS and the png format. Macromedia's biggest problem has been quality. Each generation of their software has been successively less stable than the previous version. Once upon a time they were at least as good at Adobe if not better. Adobe is the Microsoft of the market though-- attention anyone who wants to succeed: corner the business market and the designers will be forced to follow. Microsoft cornered the business world and Apple was left kissing education and designer ass. Now even education and designers are on the microsoft platforms. Adobe focused on PDFs and their overwhelming Photoshop dominance. Business used PDFs exlusively and bought Adobe products to help build them. Macromedia focused on the web designers, essentially eschewing their print market, and now they are kissing Adobe glutes. Regardless, this is not a Good Thing for the design world.
Had this happened 1 a year ago I would have cried many tears. Macromedia didn't show up at Macworld 2005, their Freehand MX is the buggies thing on the Mac since Word 6 and Dreamweaver for the PC is much better than for the Mac. From a support Apple model things really couldn't have gotten much worse for Macromedia.
Flash and Director are still powerful apps on both platforms, but Adobe doesn't compete in those arenas. People who don't see this as a monopoly are missing the point: You will be completely unable to design (web or print) without buying adobe products. (period, punto, that's it) Yes you will be able to buy Corel, Quark and even use Apple/Microsoft products - but you will not be able to produce a product without going through the world of Adobe.
This is the reason why monopolies are bad. As stated previously, the only reason why Freehand and Illustrator have half the features they do is because they were trying to out-do each other. One of the reasons PDF sucks so bad is cuz it has no real competition. GoLive got killed by dreamweaver, LiveMotion got spanked by Flash, PageMaker gets whooped on by Quark (although Framemaker is the king of it's domain), Photoshop and Fireworks complement themselves better than Photoshop and Imageready do. Macromedia is doing well with Contribute which has no Adobe equivalent.
Don't forget about the audio world - Audition fits nicely with what used to be Sound Edit 16.
This reminds me of the Dell Exec who said Apple was silly for innovating - you lose market share. "Let them innovate" and we'll mass produce it.
There will be no innovation from now on - worse still, expect Microsoft to move into this space with a piece of crap that will satisfy the basic SOHO for $99.
out,
t
Props to the Freehand+Illustrator=Frustrator/Illhand jokes.