Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4B 937
Kobayashi Maru writes "A press release from Adobe announces that they will buy Macromedia for approximately $3.4 billion. The new company will be called Adobe Systems, Inc."
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Adobe Buys Macromedia for $3.4B
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"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
CNET coverage (Score:5, Informative)
No more lawsuits huh (Score:5, Informative)
Now, we're sure to see Flash get an improved user interface. I guess this is a case where Adobe's patent really helped it innovate.
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Informative)
Display PostScript and Display PDF (Score:3, Informative)
PDF is also the imaging technology underlying Quartz, the display subsystem used on Mac OS X.
from Macromedia and Adobe... (Score:1, Informative)
As reported here [bbc.co.uk] and even on Adobe [adobe.com] and Macromedia [macromedia.com], Adobe will be aquiring Macromedia for $3.4Billion. From the Macromedia site: "The two companies are developing integration plans that build on the cultural similarities and the best business and product development practices from each company. The companies will make additional details and information about the acquisition available at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adob
With Adobe recently putting out reader 7 [slashdot.org] for linux, what should our hopes be that linux apps will be kept reasonably up to date in the integration plans?
Re:this is bad news! (Score:5, Informative)
From a we-can't-have-any-monopolies point of view, it is rather bad news. However, from a product suite POV, it's probably a good thing.
Look at it this way: Dreamweaver is considered to be about the best commercial HTML editor out there. And Flash is totally ubiquitous. However, Fireworks and Freehand are generally no-so-great (in comparison to Adobe's stuff). Photoshop and Illustrator are the de facto standards, and are great at what they do, yet Adobe's LiveMotion and GoLive are both pretty godawful.
Now that the two companies are one, you can be damn sure that you'll be able to get a package deal with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver all in one box, and they'll be as nicely integrated as Studio MX currently is. As someone who uses these on a regular basis, I'd consider that to be a pretty good thing.
Now, if only we could get Linux versions of these programs...
Re:Adobe Flash .. ? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Informative)
What happens to the Macromedia brand?
Adobe recognizes the strong equity of the Macromedia brand. That said, it makes great business sense for a company the size of the combined company to align behind a single corporate brand. Over time, Macromedia products will transition to the Adobe brand. Adobe expects to keep and continue investing in key Macromedia product brands.
Also of interest:
Do you expect to integrate the FlashPlayer and the Adobe Reader?
The complementary functionality of FlashPlayer and Adobe Reader will enable the deployment of a more robust cross-media, rich-client technology platform. The combined company will continue to be committed to the needs of both the FlashPlayer and Adobe Reader users.
Re:Competition Regulations (Score:4, Informative)
According to one of the Flash dev guys [markme.com]:
Re:Competition Regulations (Score:5, Informative)
Re:this is bad news! (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Adobe Flash .. ? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Investors not liking it. (Score:3, Informative)
this isn't abnormal.
Press Release (Score:2, Informative)
--
ADOBE TO ACQUIRE MACROMEDIA
Combined Company to Deliver Industry-Defining Technology Platform for Rich, Interactive Content
SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 18, 2005 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.
The combination of Adobe and Macromedia will provide customers a more powerful set of solutions for creating, managing and delivering compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media. Together, the two companies will meet a wider set of customer needs and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets, particularly in the mobile and enterprise segments.
"Customers are calling for integrated software solutions that enable them to create, manage and deliver a wide range of compelling content and applications - from documents and images to audio and video," said Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe. "By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software - along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform."
Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe's and Macromedia's closing prices on Friday, April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock. Upon the close of the transaction, Macromedia stockholders will own approximately 18 percent of the combined company on a pro forma basis.
In the combined company, Chizen will continue as chief executive officer and Shantanu Narayen will remain president and chief operating officer. Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia, will join Adobe as president of worldwide field operations. Murray Demo will remain executive vice president and chief financial officer. Dr. John Warnock and Dr. Charles Geschke will remain as co-chairmen of the Board of Directors of the combined company and Rob Burgess, chairman of the Macromedia Board of Directors, will join the Adobe Board.
"Both Macromedia and Adobe are passionate about creating and enabling great experiences across a wide range of devices and operating systems," said Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia. "Our combined teams will be a powerful force for innovation around cutting-edge platforms for delivering content and applications."
Integration
The two companies are developing integration plans that build on the cultural similarities and the best business and product development practices from each company. The companies will make additional details and information about the acquisition available at http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/invrelations/adobe andmacromedia.html.
"While we anticipate the integration team will identify opportunities for cost savings by the time the acquisition closes, the primary motivation for the two companies' joining is to continue to expand and grow our business into new markets," said Chizen.
The acquisition, which is expected to close in Fall 2005, is subject to customary closing conditions, including approval by the stockholders of both companies and regulatory approvals. The transaction will be accounted for under purchase accounting rules.
Due to the absence at this time of estimates of the acquisition-related restructuring costs and the allocation of the purchase price between goodwill, in-process R&D, other in
DreamweaverMX2004 is *good* (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What happens to ColdFusion? (Score:2, Informative)
There are a host of Macromedia products that aren't in Adobe's current product strategy. Adobe builds creative tools (and development tools if you count GoLive).
Adobe isn't known in the server market. With that reasoning, I think it's going to be interesting to see how the ColdFusion, Flex, Flash Remoting and Flash Communication Server survive.
At least with Flash Comm Server, Adobe has some natural workflow they can use to expand on it -- like direct encoding and upload from Premiere for better video, and publishing video with alpha layers for use in Flash 8.
Re:What will this mean for SVG? (Score:3, Informative)
A PDF reader for windows that doesn't suck (Score:2, Informative)
A PDF reader for Windows that doesn't suck. [foxitsoftware.com]
I use it with firefox. You click a pdf link. Foxit opens. It displays the PDF. It doesn't mess up your system. It runs quickly. It feels much more like reading a PDF on OS X or Linux, which is nice.
Re:I'm scared. :( (Score:3, Informative)
Well, this might not help in terms of the web-browser plugin, but when you launch it directly, holding down the shift key stops all the plugins and extra bits and pieces from loading. (Not sure what they're actually for, but for your everyday, run-of-the-mill .pdf's, disabling them doesn't seem to make any difference).
Speeds up the start up quite nicely.
Re:this is bad news! (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe produces GoLive .. Macromedia produces Dreamweaver. These are in direct competition.
Adobe produces Illustrator .. Macromedia produces Freehand. These are in direct competition.
Adobe produces Photoshop .. Macromedia produces Fireworks. These aren't direct competitors exactly, but Adobe wants everyone who uses Fireworks now to use Photoshop instead, regardless of how much bloat Photoshop has today, or how clean its generated code is.
The problem is, I like Macromedia's products. I don't want to use Adobe's. If they axe Dreamweaver and Fireworks, I won't have a choice anymore. That is what they call "bad".
I'm not happy about this at all.
Re:Damn... (Score:4, Informative)
We've already adopted Thunderbird as our default supported e-mail client, as we love both the price and the wide platform availability, it'd be great to have Nvu as a web editor with the same features.
Sure, the geeks among us can SSH-tunnel it, but that's not really an end-user solution, and end-users are the ones who need WYSIWYG editors.
Re:Flash! (Score:4, Informative)
Instead of each title being $700 each or $300 upgrade, you get the suite for $1400 new or $800 upgrade. Not a bad deal at all for an average production house.
If a house can't afford that, they shouldn't be in business.
I know of plenty of freelancers that ponied up the $1400 for CS and are doing fine on their own.
Macromedia is the expensive one here. Let's hope they change this.
Slow Acrobat Reader Fix (Score:5, Informative)
1. Install Adobe Reader 6.0 and notice where it is installed.
2. Navigate to that folder in Explorer, locate the plug_ins subfolder and rename this folder to plug_ins_disabled.
3. Create a new plug_ins folder.
4. Move the files EWH32.api, printme.api and search.api from plug_ins_disabled to plug_ins.
Try it, you'll like it!
Re:I'm scared. :( (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I'm scared. :( (Score:3, Informative)
In fact thats the only problem I ever hear about FireFox, and glad I deployed it.
Re:I'm scared. :( (Score:5, Informative)
LiveMotion is dead (Score:3, Informative)
I suspect Fireworks will replace/merge with ImageReady, as Adobe never really managed to turn it into a successful standalone. ImageReady had the better imaging, but Fireworks had the better editing tools. If we're lucky we may keep the Fireworks tools and get the picture quality of ImageReady.
Dreamweaver and GoLive are so different in programming, but my hope is that we get Dreamweaver's coding/layout GoLive's site management tools. I just hope they maintain Dreamweaver's codebase, as I loved their plugin architecture.
Director may actually see a revival, but I suspect that Director may end up like PageMaker: a tool that the users refuse to let die, so Adobe will stilll half-heartedly develop it further.
Poor Freehand. It used to be my favorite software. I wrote letters with it, made all sorts of illustrations and multipage layouts. A huge amount of my docs and illustrations are in FH8/FH9/FH11 format. Will another company come and "rescue" Freehand again? I doubt it: instead we may see some FreeHand tools integrated intro Illustrator (but not the multipage: Adobe's philosophy doesn't accomidate that).
Re:What will this mean for SVG? (Score:2, Informative)
If you look at the SVG standard, there are representatives of Macromedia listed there. They've been involved, I just don't know to what degree.
Macromedia has also added some SVG capabilities to their products, but it's been seen as a token gesture in the articles that I've read.
And of course I've got to say that I'm glad that the tutorials I do in SVG (see the sig) are at least starting to work in Firefox (just this weekend actually).
MOD PARENT DOWN; plagiarised (Score:1, Informative)
Honestly, who says "will need to be addressed, going forward" on Slashdot.
Re:Fontographer (Score:4, Informative)
If you have cash burning a hole in your pocket, get FontLab; [fontlab.com] otherwise, get FontForge. [sourceforge.net]
Better yet (Score:5, Informative)
You can still use any of them whenever you want, they just load on the fly.
Funny what happens when you read the docs that come with a program. My Adobe Reader 7.0 loads in well under 2 seconds on my 1.8Ghz.
So here's the deal, this merger will only increase the amount of software for stupid wanabe hacks out there chargin $200 to make a web page. Some unholy child will be born that will use sliced images for everything, a sea of poorly named styles and 200kb of javascript to print Hello World in a blue box. It will then try and sell you webhosting, ask you to upgrade, crash while doing it and forget how to load it's own template files.
I've been using DW since the very first beta, why? Frankly I started because I didn't know my right hand from my left and Javascript, or rather ECMA-262 was scarry and I didn't understand it and I thought CSS was bad and tables were the way to go. Tools like DW keep users in the dark making crap for people who deserve better.
Heres a clue kids, go download the GNU editor Crimson Editor and learn to write your own code. You'll be faster, more efficient and make better pages. Just give it time.
Crimson Editor is as good as the likes of EditPlus etc. Learn to make meanigful data to define your meaningful content.
Re:Better yet (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe "non-free" would be better. The non-free Crimson Editor.
If you're not referring to that, please give us a link.
Re:I'm scared. :( (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Flash! (Score:5, Informative)
Try using Save for Web... instead of Save.... Save for Web saves the file without all the metadata and the preview icon, which seriously cuts down on size. Here's an example [island.nu] that I did for Fark (safe for work), which looks halfway decent. 48k.
Re:Slow Acrobat Reader Fix (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Flash! (Score:3, Informative)
at this point there is the open source mtasc [mtasc.org] copiler, which not only is free, but is much faster and can be customizes the macromedia's.
personally, I use another open source editor called sepy [sourceforge.net] which rocks!
now there are quite a few alternatives to authoring flash content away from macromedia.
no need to create a conspiracy where there is none.
and yes, svg cannot do many things the flash player can, go check it.
Re:Freehand (Score:4, Informative)
Speaking from 8 years pre-press and printing industry knowledge here, I will say that FreeHand is the best 2 dimensional drawing application ever created. I was originally schooled using Illustrator, mainly because it came free with Photoshop, so the schools had a copy, and did not get to use FreeHand until I got my first job in prepress. In less than two weeks I converted. I can do everything in FreeHand that can be done in Illustrator, with one key difference. I can do it about 10 times faster in FreeHand.
User interface and tool behavior was designed right from the beginning in FreeHand to be efficient and intuitive. Illustrator is a hack of various thrown together features that loosely work together, in no apparent order, and with no continuity between them. Yes, I hate Illustrator. But don't get me wrong, I know how to use it inside and out. I was testing PDF and PostScript output from both of them for years and sending bug reports to Adobe regularly. I filed so many bug reports that I ended up being a go between for the Adobe developers and our development team.
I NEVER had to report a bug to Macromedia regarding output. Their PS and PDF were not always clean and streamlined, but in a print world, they were always accurate.
As much as it makes me cringe to say this (and anyone from the printing industry who has had to deal with Corel Draw would agree), but I do hope they sell FreeHand to Corel. At least somebody will be able to keep such a great peice of software alive.
Re:Better yet (Score:3, Informative)
Suggesting that Crimson Editor is non-free can and will cause confusion with its many users who have never paid a single penny for it.
Re:Flash! (Score:2, Informative)