Adobe and Macromedia Shareholders Approve Merger 169
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."
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.
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)
I agree (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. The
Re:One more acquisition... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Imagine... (Score:3, Insightful)
See also OS X, and the nifty Preview.app
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 is no competition. This should NEVER get legislative approval, but it will because it will make lots of money for the shareholders and there are programs in competition (even if none of them are in the same league, they exist so they can be listed (We will still have to compete against xxx, yyy, and zzz)).
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).
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
Re:PDF & flash (Score:4, Insightful)
Flash Commoditizes Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
Screw web "pages", the future of the web is about web "applications". Cross platform web applications marginalize (actually commoditize) Microsoft's operating system (and a big portion of it's business model.
Why do you think MS is working on Avalon?! To tie "rich" internet applications to windows, and not to other OSes like Mac or Linux.
Perhaps we should all learn Flash and start writing applications in it... this might do something to help knock MS off it's thrown. (Not that I care, but it's something a lot of Slashdotters do care about.)
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.
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:Flash Commoditizes Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
I say give me something that works consistently over something that's a "standard" but hardly ever works consistently, or takes so much time to implement consistently that I've already lost the race by the time I finish my application.