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Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Aug 28, 2005 06:31 PM
from the so-happy-together dept.
from the so-happy-together dept.
Steve Nixon wrote to mention a CRN article discussing the shareholder approval of a merger between Adobe and Macromedia. From the article: "The deal, announced in early April, is slated to close this fall pending government approval. On Thursday, the companies said nearly 99 percent of the outstanding Adobe and Macromedia shares voted were cast in favor of the deal. Adobe's powerful PDF franchise and Macromedia's ubiquitous Flash presence on PCs, Macs and other devices could make the combined company a prodigious counterweight even to Microsoft, several observers said."
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Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Interesting)
WTF does acrobat bring IE and Firefox both to their knees. And why cant you cancel it? Why is it allowed to lock up the browser, and every instance of it completely?
What is wrong with that architecture, and why do both IE and Firefox follow the same flawed model? Or is this some windows architectural thing getting involved?
Parent
Re:Imagine... (Score:2)
Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Insightful)
See also OS X, and the nifty Preview.app
Re:Imagine... (Score:2)
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Acrobat "light" is ok (Score:4, Insightful)
It's actually pretty funny that they've designed the application in a good way so things can be removed and added like this, but at the same time seems to want this to be a secret and prefers to tell the users that they need it all. Of course, this is probably just sound marketing strategy from their point of view, and the average user probably rather waits a bit than for something not to work. Not having those plugins installed means that URLs aren't clickable for instance, but I can live with the occassional copy/paste instead - and if I really wanted to, I could manually get that plugin.
So, Acrobat is really the choice as far as I can tell, even though it's not a good moral or political choice. Sure, there are plenty of other alternatives to choose from under Linux, but so far I've found none that's actually useable unless you only do sequential reading - page by page, from start to end. The few PDF:s I use are usually references and manuals of some sort, or sometimes large design documents. I need the ability to navigate these quickly. Search, bookmarks, ToC, and thumbs all those things are either missing or seriously hobbled in all the alternatives I've tried at least.
Feel free to inform me of the one I've missed. I can live with crappy rendering, if needs be, but I do need a good UI.
Parent
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)
Then I installed Adobe CS 2 on my Mac. It came with... Acrobat!
Well, to be helpful, it nicely replaced Preview as the default way to view PDFs. That meant that if I was surfing and clicked on a link to a PDF, instead of it popping up almost instantly (like another HTML page) as it did before, the WHOLE COMPUTER SLOWED DOWN and Safari almost locked up for a few seconds as it opened. Then when it was open it was slow. VERY slow.
I quickly found out how to remove the program from Safari's plugins so that it wouldn't cause that again. Acrobat absolutely sucks performance.
But things get worse. I have to run Virtual PC on my Mac and occasionally have to open a PDF in it for various reasons. Now Virtual PC says my computer is the equivalent of 300 MHz. Launching Acrobat basically locks Virtual PC up for 2-3 minutes as it launches (I let it have 512MB of ram, so that's not the problem) and then trying to USE the program is like when I found a 386 running Windows 95. Sure it WORKED, but I didn't have that kind of time to spare.
I can understand why Photoshop takes so long to load (although I think it could delay the loading of all those plugins until I trued to use one). But Acrobat is a performance black-hole for some reason I can't figure out.
So, my response to your questions: This isn't a Windows thing. It's an Acrobat thing. Find a replacement for Acrobat. I love Preview, but there must be something better for Windows too.
Parent
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=11041 [theinquirer.net]
It works for both the reader and the full acrobat.
The essence of the instructions are:
* From the Start->Run windows menu, Open the "x:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 6.0\Reader" folder, where x is the right drive letter.
* Find the plug_ins folder and rename it plug_ins_disabled
* Create a new folder named plug_ins
* Copy the following files from "plug_ins_disabled" to "plug_ins": EWH32.api, printme.api, and search.api
Parent
Re:Imagine... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Informative)
That little feature has been there since at least acrobat 3 when the first browser plugin came about.
With 6 and 7 there both package components too - so you can do a msiexec
Isn't windows cool?
Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Imagine... (Score:2)
So, my response to your questions: This isn't a Windows thing. It's an Acrobat thing. Find a replacement for Acrobat. I love Preview, but there must be something better for Windows too.
Maybe something based on xpdf? I haven't used a UNIX-y PDF viewer in a long time, but I remember from my heavy Linux usage days that xpdf (and I think gpdf) was very fast. Acrobat reader for Linux was fairly efficient too, but clunky even by the Linux GUI standards of the time (this was a couple years ago).
Re:Imagine... (Score:2)
For Firefox... (Score:2)
pdf download
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
flashblock
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.ph
Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Funny)
Or "MacrodobeMedia".
or... nevermind.
One more acquisition... (Score:5, Funny)
Hooray! (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, "a real powerhouse competitor to Microsoft"? Um.... Microsoft makes office software and operating systems. They make almost zippo from Windows Media Player. Two big multimedia-oriented companies and a pain-in-the-ass-that-just-won't-die video tech company have what influence on Microsoft?
Parent
Re:Hooray! (Score:2)
Oh, and Windows Media's pretty laden with advertisements for various companies, I'm sure that brings in a few pennies too.
Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a closer look at what Flash is rapidly becoming. It's a platform-independant development environment which is easily capable of being used to develop productivity apps. It has the capacity (with Flash Remoting and Cold Fusion) of becoming the core of a decentralised Office replacement. No dependance on Windows, no need for MS.
Re:One more acquisition... (Score:2)
Now, a real merger would be with *brace yourselves*. Apple.
Adobe has long been an Apple shop, and the acquisition of Macromedia gives them penetration into the Internet realm. Add in Apple's marketing, and you've got a powerhouse that it'd be hard for even Microsoft to compete with. Of course, Slashdot would hate it, and people would cry monopoly and Apple would be split into a hardwa
Re:One more acquisition... (Score:5, Funny)
Merger is......buffering......
Once they do acquire real we can see our pdf's......buffering......
which might actually be better than that big duff with his arms outstretched and a bazillion plugins loading below him for 1/2 an hour
Parent
Re:One more acquisition... (Score:3, Funny)
Besides, competing with Microsoft isn't a matter of size. It's a matter of getting past Microsoft's control of the basic desktop.
Yes,... just like Microsoft... (Score:4, Insightful)
THAT'S why M$ are huge.
Adobe and Macromedia already have huge penetration with Acrobat and Flash respectively on 90% of machines, but that doesn't make them close to the behemoth that M$ is.
Re:Yes,... just like Microsoft... (Score:2)
Re:Yes,... just like Microsoft... (Score:3)
I know very very well that Flash especially has a very low dev to user ratio. As an Actionscript 2 co
With as little information as we've got? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:With as little information as we've got? (Score:2)
Re:With as little information as we've got? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:With as little information as we've got? (Score:2)
That being said, there's no reason once so ever that The big money making applications would not survive; Flash, Dreamweaver, Premier, Photoshop and Acrobat are undoubtely going to survive. Most of the rest of the company is frenge products, and a lot of those overlap.
Truthfully, I'd approve the merger, but I dunno if the
Graphic Designers are all wondering what it means (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest hope is that this will create some real cross program compatibility between all of their native formats. Adobe is very good about making the jump with a file between all of their programs, and I'll look forward to doing that to MM stuff too.
My biggest fear is the monopoly of programs angle, and losing the magic that made these companies what they are.... the innovation and usability being key.
I hope they take the best from both and do something great.
competition (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:competition (Score:2, Funny)
Simple (Score:4, Interesting)
AFAIK Microsoft is getting their PDF and Flash replacements ready as we speak.
http://www.actionscript.com/archives/00000587.htm
http://www.pdfzone.com/category2/0,1874,1836049,0
Parent
Re:competition (Score:3, Insightful)
Dreamweaver could argue MS's bastard step-child Frontpage (which they don't even seem to promote anymore). But for the most part, there are no real competitors.
Photoshop? What is really up there with Photoshop? Next to nothing. Same with Illustrator. The closest things were Macromedia's products. The only ones that will have some competition left are Adobe's video products that Apple competes against (which exist, as I remember, because Adobe wouldn't port them so Apple made their own).
There
Re:competition (Score:3)
I don't see why this shouldn't get legislative approval, it's not creating a monopoly, just combining two companies that have products that control their market segments. AFAIK, nothing illegal in that.
Re:competition (Score:2)
Illustrator vs Freehand might be a more compelling argument.
Re:competition (Score:2)
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. The
wise tactical move (Score:5, Interesting)
Normal patterns in a maturing industry (Score:2, Interesting)
I think
And We Shall Call It... (Score:5, Funny)
Insiders report (Score:5, Funny)
Insiders report they will collaborate on an exciting new standard of interoperability that will lag the complete shit out of your browser.
PDF & flash (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the main advantage of a typographic file format.
Oppositely, I utterly dislike flash. I consider it just useless to the user. Only eye-candy here. Not much more.
Yes, it's interesting from the developer side, with its event controlling script engine and the ability to not be obligated to follow a rigid frame order.
But still, it's just a waste of resources.
I'm guessing if Adobe and Macromedia will try to join both or just - as written by someone else - keep 'em separated to prevent the Evil from embrace and extend (to be read as: copy and screw).
Re:PDF & flash (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Think back... (Score:3, Insightful)
Go back to about 5-6 years ago, when CSS and "design" weren't really associated with websites. They mainly consisted of lots of tables and a lot of annoying animated gifs with the occasional embedded music. But there were also the "good" sites that were easy to read, helpful and good on the eyes. If you don't get my point yet.. Flash and the PDF format have a bad name mainly because of their abuse. PDF is really not very bad. If you don't like the firefox plugin, DONT INSTALL IT. Let firefox download the pdf and voila, you have a nice, relatively small and fairly cross platform file. Then we have flash. I have seen Flash being used for a lot of very stupid things, like the ads... but I have also seen it used for some very cool things, like educational games, kiosk presentations and such. They are also being used for things like statistics with things like Flex. And with the new versions, its much easier to make Flash a lot more accessible, including language strings.
So before you start a large flame... please think of how GOOD these pieces of software are. I am personally very excited about the merger. Maybe they will soon have a Addobe + Macromedia Studio where they will just have Dreamweaver + Flash + Photoshop instead of two incomplete studios (CS and Macromedia Studio)
Cheers
SVG (Score:2, Interesting)
Who said it? (Score:2)
should save both companies a lot of money (Score:2, Funny)
Re:counterweight? .. or easier target? (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps, but PDF is an open standard, and ubiquitous. Search for a document on Google and you get a screen full of PDF links. You want to download a manual for your new sound card? PDF. You want to print up a corporate shareholder report? It's probably a PDF.
PDF isn't going anywhere.
Re:counterweight? .. or easier target? (Score:2)
Really? You'd think someone would've fixed the Wikipedia article if it wasn't.