Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005 262
dennison_uy writes "Adobe Systems Incorporated and Macromedia, Inc. today announced they have either received or been notified they will receive all regulatory clearances necessary to complete Adobe's pending acquisition of Macromedia. The companies expect to close the transaction on December 3, 2005. Does this mean the end for Fireworks and Freehand?"
Macradobe (Score:5, Funny)
To the tune of Yankee Doodle Went to London
Re:Macradobe (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Macradobe (Score:2)
The voice for all Australians.... (Score:4, Funny)
That's today you insenstive clod!
I for one live in the future, which puts December 3rd as, well, right now.
Re:The voice for all Australians.... (Score:5, Funny)
my hope is.. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:my hope is.. (Score:2)
Given the poor performance and incredible bloat of Adobe's recent releases, the end of Flash may not be a dream much longer. All we have to do is convince Adobe to add some of their shitty 3D code to Flash and nobody will want to watch a Flash movie again.
Software line-up changes? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have my own personal bets about what will be going, but of course, that's from my own perspective. From what the majority of analysts say, yes, Freehand will likely go, as will GoLive.
Much speculation exists regarding Fireworks vs. Photoshop. Photoshop will, of course, stay. What I wonder about is whether or not ImageReady will go. If they could merge some of the features of Fireworks into Photoshop, it would be a fabulous product. I've never liked ImageReady to export photos for the web, and I've not liked using Photoshop for creating simple graphic elements for online either. With enough support, Fireworks may stick around by itself, even.
While I've consistently used products from both companies, and many an employer will likely reap an initial cost-savings from the merger, I am sad to see that competition in this industry has faded. I don't think even a company with as much cash to burn as Microsoft can break in any time soon. However, the tools themselves are pretty well set, so I think the next cool thing will be modifying the user interfaces to be even MORE user-friendly and intutitive. Go GIMP and bring on some competition!
Re:Software line-up changes? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Software line-up changes? (Score:2)
Queeeeiwwww, man, what is that Steve Ballmer's aftertaste?
O_O
---
Re:Software line-up changes? (Score:2)
And while we're at it, go resurect FrameMaker, SuperPaint, and PageMaker from the Adobe^W Aldus basement...
Adobe could start an open source holding company with those 6 products alone.
Background info (Score:5, Informative)
How the Adobe-Macromedia Merger Could Impact PDF [pdfzone.com]
Interview of both CEOs [businessweek.com]
Staff's comments [kottke.org]
Article with a bit more bulk on the subject [theregister.co.uk] (The article linked about is quite small)
"Studio" Bundling? (Score:3, Interesting)
One would expect some sort of bundle to pop out of this merger that would combine Adobe and Macromedia products...anyone have any ideas on what it might include? Anything you can think of aside from the "obvious" suspects? (Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Illustrator)
Re:"Studio" Bundling? (Score:3, Funny)
-Dreamweaver
"GoLive was for web pages?? I thought it was for database management."
-InDesign
F***ing Quark, why won't you just die? Actually a version of Quark from 1996 is listed in the "Goodies" section of the install DVD. It's better than the last 2 versions and easily runs on a Palm Vx.
-Photoshop
Will now take an extra 45 seconds to load. Just
Too big? (Score:2, Interesting)
All these corporate acquisitions have me worried.
Re:Too big? (Score:2, Funny)
This just in from Time-Warner-Phillip-Morris-General-Electric-Disney -CNN news:
consolidation is good!
Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Speed (Score:3, Informative)
They definately were going for "teh snappy" with the 7 release. Try it out, it's quite a bit better.
I still prefer Preview though
(and damnit.. xpdf can suck sometimes.. why do half of my documents show only pics and no text?)
Re:Speed (Score:2)
That's because the dumb thing has a process running in the background eating resources so it starts faster. If you disable it the reader will still take a while to load unless you disable most of the plugins that they include with it.
Re:Speed (Score:4, Informative)
I tried it and the loading time went from like 10 to 1 second.
Then of course when you're doing something that requires a plugin, restore it and leave it there (for example, the search function *is* a plugin... WTF?) but anyway 90% of them won't be needed.
HTH
PDF SpeedUp -- Just use it. (Score:3, Informative)
PDF SpeedUp 1.42 [acropdf.com] (win32)
Not only a fancy way to disable the plugins, it actually removes the splash screen, removes crappy GUI elements (advertisments), etc.
Re:Speed (Score:2)
Re:Speed (Score:2)
I have a really lowend Mac (333Mhz G3 PB with only 192MB), and while Preview starts faster, it's significantly slower at rendering PDFs than Adobe Reader 6. When it takes your machine several minutes to render a complex PDF, it's very noticable.
Re:Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
Time to abandon Middle-Earth (Score:2, Funny)
Unless they buy Corel too and Painter dies. But surely the Valar would intervene in such a case. Boy, the Silmarillion really ought to address this sort of problem.
No, flee to Free-Earth (Score:2)
This annoucement just means less competition. Which is always bad for users...
Stupid idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stupid idea. (Score:2)
What history has taught us ... (Score:4, Insightful)
But how did they deal with Freehand, when they already had Illustrator? Why, they sold it off to someone else, and conveniently enough, they're getting it back again.
So, if they feel that there's a legitimate reason to maintain two seperate programs that do similar things, they'll be likely to slowly change the two until you get to the point where it's easy to jump ship to the one they prefer (basically, make sure that any outstanding features have been migrated to the other product line), and then kill off the old one.
In the case where they're no significant differentiation in capabilities between the two, they may see the benefit in getting some money back by flipping it to some other company.
By the time we're done, Freehand will have seen more company trades than WordPerfect.
Too bad... (Score:2, Interesting)
FYI (Score:2, Insightful)
Sandvox won't have pro features (Score:2)
It might be a great app for the average user to throw up a good looking templated site, but it isn't going to be much use to anyone who wants to make complex, original custom designs.
Re:Too bad... (Score:2)
Re:Too bad... (Score:2)
forget firework and freehand! --My fear (Score:2)
Macromedia used to be cool (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, making a "professional" version of the Flash tool - I'm sure pretty much everyone who buys Flash is a professional, the "professional" version is just an excuse to charge extra for things that should be in the main product.
And they are trying to push developers in the direction they want them to go, rather than providing what developers want. For instance, they have a heavy focus now on using Flash for on-line forms and applications, but when was the last time you actually used a Flash application online? And yet many developers use PHP and are now interested in Ruby and AJAX but Macromedia have very poor support for those technologies.
I would like to think something positive will come out of this merger, but I'm afraid the new Adobe will just use their new powers to try to force developers in the direction they want them to go and find new ways to squeeze more money out of them.
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:3, Insightful)
The Kottke summary linked in the writeup cites Tim Bray as saying that he thinks Flash will be phased out, since i
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:2)
Exactly. How many serious web developers actually want that? That's my point - they want you to develop what they want, not what you want.
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:2)
I still think they were probably right about the "rich media supplement" thing, but "supplementing HTML entirely" bit was never gonna happen.
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:2)
I think the word you're looking for is "supplant", meaning roughly "to take over the position of something else; to replace".
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:2)
I should have known skipping the coffee this morning was a bad idea.
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:2)
I think both Adobe and Macromedia are getting squeezed out of the market anyway: open formats and changes in technology are eating into their market from one side, and Microsoft is threatening them from the other. Flash is likely going to disappear altogether over the next decade, and PDF will probably be created entirely with non-Adobe tools, many of them free.
Re:Macromedia used to be cool (Score:3, Interesting)
You go develop a web app with AJAX, and then do the same in flash, and come back and tell u
how about this. (Score:2)
Macromedia is expensive for Adobe, but it might be enough to slow/stop MS from jumping into Adobe's primary business (Photoshop, Illustrator, and inDesign).
Re:how about this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Right now, a massive portion of Adobe's income comes from the Acrobat/PDF/LiveCycle products, and it's the part that is growing the fastest. Macromedia had been developing 'Flash Paper'
Re:how about this. (Score:2)
Also, Johnee makes the correct point that Acrobat is just the tip of the iceburg for Adobe -- their enterprise document management stuff is huge and makes them at least as much money as Photoshop does. MS can't compete with j
Re:how about this. (Score:2, Interesting)
To expand though, it's not just the fact that Acrobat and document management is where income is now, it's that that is where they see the growth. Graphics and the creative market will grow, but only at the rate of the economy. They dominate that market, so they can't get more market share, and that sector isn't exactly outstripping the rest of the economy.
Document and information management is a place where they can really grow exponentially. As far as I can tell, (I
Re:how about this. (Score:2)
Macromedia had been slowly repositioning themselves as a development tool vendor. Flash was moving from animation to a "RAD" tool. Dreamweaver was becoming a competitor to VisualStudio for web development. ColdFusion was reinvented into a J2EE tag framework. This is all compeititon directly aimed at Microsoft's bread-n-butter tools.
Meanwhile Adobe has always been very good at focusing on the design and "epaper" markets and staying the hell
Re:how about this. (Score:2)
ColdFusion shoutout (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:ColdFusion shoutout (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been developing since V2 and the MX range has revitalised it as a dev environment. It gets a bad name because it's easy to write crap code, but if it's properly written and servers are properly managed there's not much you can't do with it.
I could go on, but I won't, cos you'll all get very, very bored if I start ranting.
Macromedia should school Adobe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Macromedia should school Adobe (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you seen Macromedia LiveDocs? I remember they sent out a survey about what users wanted for an online help system - and LiveDocs is somehow what they came up with. Why are docs javascript driven? Why do they take 45 seconds to load? Why do all the pages have stupid urls like http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flash/mx2004/main_7 _2/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm?href=Part_ASL R.html [macromedia.com]? Where is the single list of all classes? Also, the amount of typos and er
Re:Macromedia should school Adobe? (Score:2)
Livemotion & Flash (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, Adobe already tried this with Flash competitor called Live Motion [adobe.com]. It was a tool that had great potential, but it couldn't make inroads into the market that Flash totally dominated. Adobe admitted defeat and pulled it from market in 2003.
Re:Livemotion & Flash (Score:2)
But remember, great tools take time to mature. In 1996 when Macromedia bought FutureSplash and renamed it to Flash, it was a very poor tool that had a lot of potential. It didn't become very useful until version 3 or 4.
If you hold LiveMotion up to early versions of FutureSplash/Flash, they're about the same in terms of UI and functionality. I think Adobe made the right decision to ash-can the product, because there was no way that they were
Speed (Score:2, Insightful)
The Adobe Touch (Score:2)
The future (Score:5, Interesting)
- more PDFs on web pages
- more Flash on webpages
- more Flash in PDFs
- more PDFs in Flash
...and of course... (Score:2)
There opportunity for terror here... (Score:2)
Once that's possible, you can embed a Flash in a PDF within a Flash within a PDF... and so on. Place the things all around the web and bring the computers of the world (well, the Windows boxes, anyway) to their knees as they all break down in an infinitely recursive downward death spiral of shallow content. Ha ha haaa!
No, it doesn't... (Score:2)
This won't be completely straightforward. There are design and user philosophy's that will need to be reconciled between the engineering groups.
I believe it will be 2 years or
Imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Imagine... (Score:4, Funny)
This is the kind of thinking that makes me want kill people.
This is all because of the .. (Score:2)
That was supposed to be ironic / funny. Alas, the fact is that gimp sucks compared to commercial offerings and is a major black eye for proponents of F/OSS.
64-bit plug-in (Score:2, Informative)
Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
But consumers should benefit from integrated products nonetheless. Let us remember the big interface lawsuits of just a few years ago between these companies. Adobe sued MM over the fact you could configure your interface with floating palettes to look like just like their products, and MM was forced to come up with the whole dockable palettes thing.
what I imagine is going to occur, and what I have held off purchasing the latest MM studio for, is this:
1) Freehand goes away completely, it's already too much like Illustrator to survive.
2) Fireworks gets rebranded as an Illustrator lite, and some of it's rasterization features are taken away. It's made into a lightweight production tool for Flash and Web graphics and given all sorts of hooks into Illustrator.
3) Dimensions returns as a 3D solution for Flash.
M
Illustrator should have a Freehand mode (Score:2)
Remember what happened to Frame? (Score:2, Interesting)
Freehand... I hope not (Score:2)
I hope Adobe does not discontinue Freehand, I'd hate to see the market shrink down to just Illustrator.
Adobromedia (Score:2)
Photoshop will change in the wake of Aperture.
Illustrator will become part of the Flash Suite, which will be drastically reorganized and simplified.
GoLive will shed its skin in favor of Dreamweaver's.
ColdFusion will die a slow quiet death or be spun off into a separate organization. Possibly with an OpenSource component.
--
I, for one, wel
Designers the world over wait with baited breath.. (Score:2, Funny)
We can but hope.
so.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:More importantly (Score:2)
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:2)
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:2, Insightful)
use delineate (Score:2)
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:5, Interesting)
A shame really. The FH development process was a fine example of how things were supposed to be done. Proper bug tracking, competent managers (no, I was just a grunt developer), plenty of testers, proper specs. One can argue with the actual features and the archaic nature of the multitude of settings but the process was good. The latest release has unfortunately not held up well on OS X though.
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:2)
Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:2, Insightful)
I am sick and tired on websites that use 30% of my CPU just to show a useless, animated logo, or using Flash menus that can't be searched in or for, and unable of being indexed by search engines, and that break back and forward navigation, or waiting 10 seconds or more when a new page loads just to be
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry to disappoint your faith in groupthink. Flash has legitimate, appropriate uses, such as creating sites that go beyond simple click-to-the-next-page interfaces. Just because it's frequently misused, or because you don't see any value in rich media and want it banned from the web, doesn't mean that everyone agrees with you.
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:2, Insightful)
I also thought that most folks here thought that Flash is the single largest scourge on the web. Or to be more precise that its inappropriate use is.
While Flash indeed, as mentioned, has legitimate and appropriate uses, there seems to be far more inappropriate use out there. This seems to grow daily. It's not just the inane moving graphics, it's not just the cpu load from badly designed stuff, it's the damn sound effects that get me. I often browse late at nig
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:3, Insightful)
Which is not to say I give Flash a free pass--there is undoubtedly crappy Flash out there. But like any technology, including the Slashdot-friendly iPod, and P2P apps, it has its good and bad uses.
(
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:3, Interesting)
We're not going to be pushing for a ban on HTML are we? Because HTML *can* be used for
Re:Flash Plugins (Score:4, Insightful)
This is because you're only being exposed to "Skip-Intro" sites built by incompetent Flash users that don't know how to code in Actionscript and so are left making movieClips and timelines. Problem is that movieClips, especially invisible ones, CONTINUE to play little blinking animations etc in the background and will hog your CPU. It's important to note that this is NOT a problem with Flash or the plugin, you can put that problem squarely on the head of idiot users.
Macromedia's website is built on 80% Flash content, does your CPU run at 30% + to view it? No. Why? Because they have users that *know* how to build proper Flash animations.
Try viewing a page with 7+ animated gifs and see what happens to your cpu.
Re:obviously... (Score:2)
Re:obviously... (Score:2)
(The property bar in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign changes [for the most part] with every tool.)
Re:obviously... (Score:2)
While FreeHand is a great product, it really can compete with Illustrator on smaller shops that do Web and Print, but Illustrator print capabilities are better and even if you make your art entirelly on FH you'll need Illustrator to generate a professional-grade printable file (be it TIFF, PS or PDF). Think about FreeHand as a companion for Flash, it is the ideal place to generate all those flashy graphics that you'll animate on Flash.
Fireworks goes the same way, and it's even more web-centric
Re:obviously... (Score:2, Insightful)
Back in the day, FreeHand was at least competitive with -- and in several respects, su
Re:obviously... (Score:2, Insightful)
As much as Fireworks compliments Photoshop and Dreamweaver, I don't think there's really much of a necessity for it if you already have a program that is technically capable of doing everything.
Fireworks (Score:5, Insightful)
PNG support is also much better, it produces smaller, better quality files than Photoshop manages to.
I do agree with your comment on freehand however, it is indeed doodooo.
PNG better quality? (Score:2)
That's odd... short of saving at 16bits/channel (which maybe Photoshop can't do - I don't touch that thing), I don't think there are any quality settings with PNG per se; it is a lossless format, after all.
Re:PNG better quality? (Score:5, Informative)
There's a lot you can to optimize PNGs, for example with pngcrush [sourceforge.net]. See Wikipedia's detail on PNG filesizes [wikipedia.org]. For more info on PS's bad handling of PNG, see Photoshop & PNG [fundy.net] about halfway down that page.
Re:Fireworks (Score:2)
Isn't Freehand already a discontinued product? Last I checked, they hadn't updated Freehand in years (it's still at MX, which is 2 versions behind all their other apps), and Macromedia seemed to be pushing Fireworks as both a bitmap and vector program.
Anyway, I agree that Fireworks is a pretty decent app. It doesn't really compete directly with photoshop, but it would seem strange for Adobe to have Photoshop, Imageready, Illustrator,
Re:Fireworks (Score:2)
Re:Now your .pdf files will flash many colours (Score:2)
Because of the buisness nature they will be copies and posted on multiple web sites so they put a link back to the original company.
Re:Now your .pdf files will flash many colours (Score:2)
Re:I hope (Score:2)
Re:Go-Live Pwns you! (Score:2)
If you're not the only one who loved that feature, it will pop up again - but this time, the focus on it will be more pronounced. Tabs in IE are a similar, though reversed, example.
This is an excellent opportinity for OpenSource tools to become more elegant, streamlined, and professional.
Less commercial competetion means more vacuum to pull F/OSS goodness to the top.