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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8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
Too late buddy... (Score:4, Interesting)
If this is not a joke, then we'll finally get good support for exporting Illustrator files to Flash!!
Consolidation (Score:5, Interesting)
Good news for Inkscape (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's good news for us. There will be people scared or disgusted by the forming monopoly and looking for alternatives. Also, it seems likely that Freehand will be either discontinued or at least downplayed so as to not hurt Illustrator, which means a lot of users will have to migrate. All this gives us a certain opportunity.
Re:this is bad news! (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally think this is at LEAST *promising* news!
Re:Adobe Flash .. ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Competition Regulations (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no 3rd.
Would competition regulators look to block this merger??
If Ford wanted to merge with General Motors, there would be serious investigations. Oracle needed to show there was competition from SAP & JD Edwards before it was allowed to acquire Peoplesoft.
Freehand (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:this is bad news! (Score:4, Interesting)
Anti-competition (Score:4, Interesting)
This makes good sense from both companies' perspective and this is clearly signalled in the fact that it comes with the blessing of both boards. Adobe has traditionally been strong in the offline graphical design business particularly with respect to desktop publishing in the newspaper and magazine publishing world. The company has also made its PDF reader ubiquitous in the desktop space and has a strong enterprise play.
Macromedia, on the other hand, has a much stronger presence in graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for the desktop with its Dreamweaver and Flash product set. Both companies have made plays into the wireless market with the promise of rich media applications and cross platform access.
Macromedia, however has made stronger inroads into this market with recent deals with key operators and device manufacturers that will see Flash expanding its reach from the desktop environment to wireless platforms.
The deal itself is not without issues from a competition standpoint since the resulting business will almost certainly hold a sizeable chunk of the GUI market that would make it difficult for some smaller vendors to play in. The companies have overlapping product sets and a product portfolio that goes in many different directions. That is both a positive and a negative and will need to be addressed, going forward.
SVG question (Score:5, Interesting)
Investors not liking it. (Score:5, Interesting)
bad move (Score:2, Interesting)
One can only hope that this will increase the viability of open souce design and display technologies (GIMP, etc).
It will also be interesting to see what they do with ColdFusion, which while it had floundered for the first couple of years under MACR, had recently come out with some pretty impressive capabilities.
What happens to ColdFusion? (Score:3, Interesting)
PDF is already a strange mix (Score:5, Interesting)
PDF (like HTML) has long strayed from its original purpose into uncharted territory. This is not (IMO) a Good Thing
Quark (Score:5, Interesting)
However... they won't stay at no.1 for long.
What happens to our investment in MM products? (Score:4, Interesting)
And what about all those websites on Cold Fusion. Those folks
are seriously out of luck. (We don't use it though, thankfully)
Re:Expensive Bloatware (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:this is bad news! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Damn... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is that a good thing or a bad thing though?
Re:Wonder what will happen to OS X? (Score:5, Interesting)
PDF != Adobe. The implication in many historical documents concerning OS X is that PDF was chosen as the basis for Quartz precisely because it was an open, royalty-free format, unlike Display PostScript (which powered OS X's predecessor, NextStep - or NeXTStep, or ... nevermind).
I do all kinds of PDF work (viewing, generating) and have not a single Adobe application on my system.
Adobe + Flash = Big (Score:3, Interesting)
Incredibly bad (Score:4, Interesting)
This is honestly one of the worst things that can be imagined for most of us in the web world. The reality being that web development products will suddenly be submerged in a see of pure WYSIWYG. While I've been looking forward to seeing what features are going to be in GoLive CS2, I'm not too optimistic.
I don't know how many other people feel like this, but it does seem that we're heading back to the days of developer and designer being in completely different realms, and where the graphic designer thinks he or she can do whatever as long as they see it beautifully.
At least there's still GIMP and NVU, right? Maybe they'll get a lot more support once Adobe jacks up all the prices again.
Re:Damn... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm. Time for Bill to wade into the fray? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Competition Regulations (Score:4, Interesting)
SVG isn't really the competition long term for Flash. Macromedia hasn't been shy about the fact they'd like to turn Flash into an application front end for the desktop. Microsoft's Avalon features are a direct competitor to this.
Adobe and Microsoft have been skirting around real competition for years. XDocs anyone? There is no question that Microsoft will be looking to oust Adobe and PDF as the long term format for secure document interchange.
This isn't a merger of two major forces-- this is a merger of two minor players in the long term hoping to compete with the big dog.
Re:this is bad news! (Score:2, Interesting)
Stability? Since when? (Score:2, Interesting)
It looks to me like Adobe is competing with Microsoft for needlessly bloated code.
Macromedia apps on the other hand install right the first time and start correctly, but never seem to do anything that I want them to do, that the docs explicitly state they should do.
So now we get apps that won't install correctly, won't start in a reasonable amount of time when you do finally shoe-horn them in, and then won't do what they are supposed to? This is like the graphic design equivalent of Windows 95 first release.
I second, third, fourth, etc. the question on the wisdom of allowing the #1 and #2 companies in the field merging without a viable #3 and #4 fast behind to become the new #2 and #3. Are we to expect Corel to pull a miracle out of their nether regions to compete? Will we b*tch and moan if MS steps to the plate with offerings that it bundles with Windows?
Sorry, but as a tech with some scruples I gotta say we shouldn't be letting the creation of a new Microsoft of the graphics world get going: a behemoth company that puts out stuff that doesn't work right and doesn't care but you don't have much of a choice because you're already joined at the hip and reliant upon their stuff for your daily business.
Re:Investors not liking it. (Score:2, Interesting)
sometimes it feels good to be a wee bit of a finance nerd...
Re:Flash! (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmm. I wonder if this means we'll be seeing SVG [adobe.com] support in Macromedia's Flash Player [macromedia.com] any time soon?
That alone would be worth the ridiculous amount of money Adobe coughed up...
Can I borrow your crystal ball? (Score:5, Interesting)
What, exactly, makes you so sure? You got a portal to the future you're not telling us about?
Adobe *loves* the idea of lock-in. Remember, this is the company that had someone *arrested* for reverse-engineering Adobe's eBook format just so people could view and make backups of their files. (See http://www.freesklyarov.org/ [freesklyarov.org] for details.)
So given the choice between something like SVG, which Adobe doesn't totally control, and Flash, which (assuming this goes through) Adobe will own, lock, stock, and barrel, I strongly suspect they will go for the latter.
Money follows the path of least resistance.
Re:What will this mean for SVG? (Score:3, Interesting)
macromedia makes money on the Flash creation software, not directly on the use of flash on websites. For Adobe, having PDF be an open document format has protected Adobe from a lot of criticism and calls for an alternative. SVG was created largely beacuse Flash was proprietary, but it is also very nice that it is an open xml standard. It would make more sense for Adobe to roll SVG support into their Flash MX (or whatever they call their creator tool these days).
Otherwise SVG will just continue to grow and people will create new better tools to manage the xml. And Adobe will likely be stuck with an open source competitor that has native support in Firefox (and IE would likely follow unless they pay Microsoft big money not to include it).
Either way Adobe should just continue to embrace svg, because they aren't going to be able to kill it and if they try it will just come back stronger than before.
Though I could see a situation were Adobe hobbles their plugins so that it won't provide the functionality of flash. The best thing to do here is to finish building svg support into firefox where it belongs and to push ahead regardless of what adobe decides.
read a old discussion about fireox support here [mozillazine.org]
Fontographer (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:SVG question (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, it's not the fatal blow it might have been a couple of years ago; other companies are producing SVG renderers, and Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and a future Opera verison will have SVG support built-in. The intermingling of HTML and SVG code might allow for nifty effects that make Flash look old hat, at that.
Re:PDF Good, Flash Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh please. You elitist geeks think that all processing should be offloaded into our brains and information should be stored in some minimal format that gives you complete control so can satisfy your fetishistic automation desires.
Well despite what your huge brain has convinced itself of, there is a legitimate need for technologies such as Flash and PDF. Not everything is a tech spec or a tutorial on doing minor meaningless tweaks to your hardware so you can avoid human contact for one more weekend.
Sorry to get personal, but as someone who has to create documents that need to be printed, I can tell you unequivocably that PDF is the only viable option for printable documents that must be distributed to the general public. Furthermore, it's a reality that I may have to put 50 page documents on a website at the drop of a hat. Sure I could save as HTML from Word, but if you know anything about that you'd realize it's actually much worse than a PDF.
And while I'm on a rant, I should say every geek complaining about the uselessness of Flash needs to understand that they don't have the first fucking clue about design and why it's important. You think marketing is useless, you hate designers, and you probably have yourself convinced advertising doesn't affect you. The irony is that as you roll your eyes at the television you are being manipulated by the very people who you consider worthless. Just like PDF, there are certain things that can only be done with Flash. Just because you misunderstand and disregard those things does not make them invalid.
Re:DreamweaverMX2004 is *good* (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience, Dreamweaver is more than useless (but just under Frontpage and the Horror that is Word 2003 -> HTML) for programmers.
I output hundreds of pages per month, but I don't code all of them, because I template 1 or 2 and write code in a text editor that automagially creates all the other crap. It even produces valid XHTML1.0 Strict.
In any case: Adobe: Remember Skylarov. I don't buy Adobe software because of how they treated Skylarov. Not that it makes any difference, though, because I didn't buy Adobe software before, or Macromedia for that matter.
Again, I'll repeat: I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer.
Re:Flash! (Score:4, Interesting)
Some solutions to knee-jerk Flash hatred (Score:5, Interesting)
You make a good point -- perhaps you and I don't disagree as much as it might seem. Some author-control of layout is not a bad thing. A consistent site page design certainly aids navigation, comprehension, and usage. What I would like is more control of type size (new versions of HTML suffer from this too) because some designers choose excessively small or excessive large type. I'd also like more control of color because too many designers make bad decisions (e.g.,. yellow text on white backgroud, non-standard colors for HREFs, etc.).
most designers out there seem to not be up to the job.
This is the heart of the problem with Flash today. The technology itself is not evil, but too many of its developers are just bad and they ruin it for the better developers that do do a good job with Flash. Perhaps if Flash had a certification program or some scheme for regulating who used it, it would be better. In architecture, you have to have license to practice and perhaps Flash needs that too.
This may lead to a competiting platform for SVG development, as far as web navigation goes, which could allow for fast downloads and more end-user control of format.
This is where you and I part company. I absolutely don't want a TV-like experience -- this is my biggest reason for Flash-hatred. I prefer interaction, manipulation, and navigation. I want a self-paced, not a author-paced experience. I want to be able to randomly access the parts of the site I'm interested in. I want to spend as much or a little time dwelling on any given part of the site as I choose. I want to be able to navigate back and forth over the content. I want to be able to copy-paste snippets of text (I use the web for research). Too many Flash site take that control away from me and I don't like it.
If the fraction of bad Flash dropped, I would gladly become a fanboy. But until Flash developers realize that some people don't want a passive, linear, author-controlled experience, there will be too much bad Flash and too much knee-jerk hatred of what could be an awesome technology for interactive sites.
Thanks for writing an insightful counterargument.
All our eggs, in one big basket? (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm a designer (print/multimedia/web) by profession and have been for years. To say that Adobe and Macromedia aren't in direct competition is lunacy. Look at the creative suites the two companies offer, with few exceptions, both present programs that do the same thing.
Photoshop & Fireworks = Raster editors
Flash & After Effects & LiveMotion = Motion graphic editors
Dreaweaver & GoLive = Extended HTML WYSIWYG editors
Illustrator & Freehand = Vector editors
The major differences between the two programs of the same type is how efficiently you can accomplish tasks and how much control you have over what you design. In reality, a good designer can make virtually identical pieces using products from either company. The only major difference is the time required to do it. The design community is used to the fact that there are things that Adobe has perfected and the same holds true for Macromedia. Truth is, outside of some minor annoyances, they work very well together. In any design firm in the world, you'll be able to find offerings from both.
In the world of core graphic design software, there are only two players: Adobe and Macromedia. Without including 3D programs or strict painting programs (which are typically marginalized in most standard print or online applications) no other company comes close.
When all is said and done, this merger is MAJOR. No one can argue that a merger between the two companies could easily produce the "end-all" design suite. I don't know that that scenario is in our best intrests, though. I firmly believe that design has blossomed as much as it has in the last 10 years for print, multimedia and web because there has been at least moderately healthly competition between these two. Removing competition from the playing field is never good for consumers. As for the alternatives out there, I've tried most, and I've gotta give most of them two thumbs way down. As much as I love Linux, open source solutions, and start-up underdogs (and I do love them) you'd be crazy in a business where time is always critical to go with anything less the best.
Just my two credits.
Mac OSX Support (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:DreamweaverMX2004 is *good* (Score:3, Interesting)
End of Mac? (Score:3, Interesting)
This blows. As my fellow prepress and publishing professionals know, Adobe has begun to act more and more hostilely toward the Macintosh platform. An important VP there -- brought over from Microsoft, no less -- has repeatedly spread ridiculous anti-Mac FUD, in everything from press releases to book reviews, and Adobe's development for OS X has been dreadful -- still nothing, except for the very latest version of Acrobat, is Cocoa, and Adobe has insisted that Photoshop will not take advantage of OS X's best graphics-performance features.
In all this, some of us had hoped Macromedia would, eventually, save the day. Of course, they have a very long way to go to offer a professional replacement for Adobe products, especially Photoshop, but we still entertained some hope. And, as previous posters have pointed out, at least there was healthy competition.
DTP and prepress are huge consumers of the Mac -- one may go so far to say that they are what has kept Apple afloat through bad and good times. Now what? If Adobe continues to push Windows, DTP and prepress may be forced to make that odious switch, and Apple may be jeopardized. Let's devoutly hope my predictions don't prove true.
Educational pricing (Score:3, Interesting)
Sadly, this isn't going to do anything to fix the proliferation of idiotic version "numbers", as both companies have fallen off the deep end with inscrutible nonsense like "CS 2" and "MX 04".
Re:End of Mac? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:MOD PARENT FUNNY! (Score:2, Interesting)
BTW, you guys should check out the new Xara X1. Xara is independent from Corel again, and their vector program is truly unique. It doesn't have the feature bloat that CorelDRAW & Illustrator have, and it can make some stunning graphics. Definitely not a replacement, but a great addition.
Dom
Example of the damage: PS filters in FireWorks (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't disagree with the original poster that competition did drive these two to one-up each other's features, but you're right(er) on the essentials: Adobe has continued to be the traditional publishing giant, and Macromedia has had the Web world edge. They've been in slightly different markets, and to some extent their competition has injured the consumer in unnecessary ways.
For another non-trivial example of the way their competition has sometimes stung us, take a look at how Fireworks has, and hasn't, and then has been able to use various PhotoShop filters. The upgrade path for Fireworks has been affected by this, for me. I don't want to upgrade my software only to lose a bunch of third-party filters that suddenly won't work in the new version. Caused by Adobe and Macromedia sparring it out, pure and simple.
That said, I'll believe Adobe can rationalize the overlapping product lines when I see it. They can't be stupid enough to kill off the Dreamweaver line in favor of a GoLive, for Gawd's sake, but it wouldn't amaze me if they kept trying to fold in Fireworks' html-exporting features and wound up confusing PS for no real gain.
Re:What will this mean for SVG? (Score:1, Interesting)
Ha! A taste of their own medicine (Score:2, Interesting)
Macromedia hired a ton of people right out of college, with zero experience, promoted the most obsequious/self-serving, and you know the rest of the story. 26 year-olds with no industry experience running the show, promoting their friends, etc. It was a very disfunctional company, with some really talented people who somehow survived in the chaos. Hope the creepiest ones get cut first.
good luck, Adobe, you have some major prima donnas coming your way.
Re:Microso..I mean..Adobe acquires Macromedia (Score:2, Interesting)
FreeHand's masking blows Illustrator's out of the water. It's precision drawing ability is far superior to Illustrator. It launches in a fraction of the time of Illustrator. It's files are a third of the size of Illustrator's, it's customizable toolbars and keyboard shortcuts meant I was able to use a 17" CRT for YEARS before I had to finally get a Cinema display - to accomodate Illustrator's hulky bevy of toolbars and redundant windows!
Anyway, I do understand people liking Illustrator, I said I finally switched, but any of my employees who've been exposed to FreeHand for any length of time wish for a hybrid of the two. Unfortunately, this new merger (or buyout or whatever) probably won't give us that. Competition is a good thing.
Adobe sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
They advertised that Acrobat files can be read on "any platform" when all they offered was Mac and Losedows versions, even when there were quite a few operating systems out there, especially Linux, with millions of users at the time, that could have used Acrobat, and people were begging and pleading with them to support those operating systems, even at a cost.
They incorporated software into Photoshop CS to thwart the forgery of money, just to prove that they believe their customers are low-life criminals. Not that this necessarily inconveniences any legitimate user, except for the extra unnecessary processing overhead, but it shows what they think of their customers.
I don't like Adobe. Luckily, I am the one who specifies hardware and software purchases for our company. I buy software from Adobe's competition. The first item above, Mr. Sklyarov's arrest, is the primary reason that I do so, but the second and third items only show that Adobe thinks their customers are stupid (the "any platform" thing) and criminals (the money thing). Too bad. They could have been a first-class company.
Re:Flash! (Score:3, Interesting)
It's site management and collaboration features are incredible. For the most part, Flash websites take much longer to load (no 56k need apply), and offer a great deal more overhead than they make up for with usability (you with the P II-450, don't even try).
Re:Expensive Bloatware (Score:3, Interesting)
Not true. I skipped the upgrade from Photoshop 6.0 to 6.5, and when 7.0 came out they wanted me to pay full price. So I'm still using 6.0.
As for the vector art thing, when I'm designing a web page I need to use both vector and bitmap art together in the same document. Photoshop doesn't do that very well, IMO.