Thursday, April 28, 2005

Adobe & Macromedia

This news is specially interesting for the designers - graphic, web whatever! - as the two giants Adobe & Macromedia have merged together. Well, not merged. Adobe has bought Macromedia for over 3 billion US Dollars. That's right, that's a 'b'.

Adobe has also announced that the although the Macromedia products such as the famous Macromedia Flash etc will be maintained and built upon, the Macromedia brand itself will eventually be phased out. Now we be buying Adobe Flash!

Adobe website Macromedia website

2 comments:

Abbas Halai said...

Probably that the next version of the flash plugin will take 15 minutes to fire up, just like everything else from Adobe, and that during that time your system will be too bogged down to respond to “back” or “close” or anything else, so you’ll finally have time to read all those paper publications again.

Anonymous said...

Actually this is a mixed blessing. Story lacks any interesting details.

Adobe Photoshop has one of the best application UIs. MM was taken to court for using Photoshop style menus so their interface should be seeing improvements.

They will probably phase out MM freehand in favor of illustrator (the latter is more powerful). Dreamweaver will prevail over GoLive so web publishing will be more uniform.

They will write some PDF APIs to hook into Cold Fusion server. Possibly enable Adobe style plugin support for the Flash environment which would be quite nice.

Primariy though, Adobe took over MM as a preemptive measure. During the current integrate-and-consolidate phase of the tech industry it was a big threat. It also makes sense financially since now they have virtually no competition and this will add to their bottom line ($).

This gives them a solid base in the web publishing department: best graphic tool, best html editor, best vector graphic and multimedia authoring tool, a solid server -- the entire assembly line. Where they take this lies in their hands (inertia usually sets in when competition is bleak).

They will now scramble to stabilize their PDF format because Microsoft is getting in with Metro (open). If Adobe PDF Viewer (and it's browser integration) didn't suck so bad PDFs would be a tolerable experience. Metro is an open standard so this should shake things up in the document industry.