Adobe Buys Macromedia

April 18, 2005 @ 5:12 pm · Filed under Computers, Flash, Software, Web

So Adobe’s buying Macromedia. Interesting.

From a customer’s perspective, these two companies seem very different, but they also share qualities.

Both companies enjoy natural monopolies which no one seems to especially mind (unlike Everyone’s Favorite Monopolist).

Macromedia delivers upgrades on a cycle that seems driven more by the calendar than by code-readiness. By contrast, Adobe releases solid upgrades that are ready for prime-time. This could be a good thing.

Adobe’s wounded feelings about Final Cut Pro (which you may recall was originally conceived at Macromedia), iMovie and iPhoto aside, Adobe’s history with feature-parity on the Mac has been a bit spotty in recent years (see Acrobats 4 through 7, SVG).

Macromedia also has issues in this regard; missing in action is ColdFusion MX 6.1 Developer Edition for Mac (not that Mac users get a discount on Studio MX, a play stolen from Adobe’s Acrobat pricing model…). Flash Player’s sluggishness on the Mac is also legendary.

What will be most interesting — as it always is in such cases — will be what survives and what doesn’t.

  • Dreamweaver vs. GoLive (DW, I think)
  • Flash vs. SVG (expect to see SVG support tossed on the heap next to LiveMotion)
  • ImageReady vs. Fireworks (hard to say, I haven’t used Fireworks)
  • Freehand vs. Illustrator (those who like Freehand like it a lot, and it’s survived being moved from Aldus to Altsys to Macromedia. I suspect they’ll integrate the Flash-friendly elements into Illustrator and retire it.)
  • FlashPaper vs. PDF (neither will perish)
  • InDesign vs. Quark (oh wait, that’s a different acquisition…)

The upside of all this will be

  • Adobe will benefit from Macromedia’s mind-share among the web development crowd
  • tighter integration between apps (Flash & Illustrator, Photoshop & After Effects)
  • more consistent user-interfaces (Adobe has done a wonderful job with this, while Macromedia seems to annoy Mac and Windows users — “It’s too Mac-like!”, “It’s too Windows-like!”)
  • Macromedia never seems to fix any of the bugs I care about. Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator (my main Adobe apps) have so few issues by comparison that I can’t comment on how fast they fix them.
  • Hey, maybe Adobe can be convinced to breathe some life into Fontographer (another refugee from Aldus/Altsys)! That would be cool…
  • The total in this buyout could easily be more than the sum of the parts.

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