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?"
Re:Macradobe (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
"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)
Too big? (Score:2, Interesting)
All these corporate acquisitions have me worried.
Stupid idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
Too bad... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Software line-up changes? (Score:2, Interesting)
ColdFusion shoutout (Score:4, Interesting)
The future (Score:5, Interesting)
- more PDFs on web pages
- more Flash on webpages
- more Flash in PDFs
- more PDFs in Flash
Imagine... (Score:2, Interesting)
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' and had done great work on making things usable and portable on mobile devices and more lightweight on more platforms.
Expect to see Flash Paper die, and expect to see some of the Flash plug-in multiple platform technologies be leveraged to provide more and better portability of PDFs.
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.
Remember what happened to Frame? (Score:2, Interesting)
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'm in government) the PDF tools really hold the most promise of any technology to really save us money, time, and management costs as far as reducing the amount of paper we have to move around. Plus, done right, it can really make things easier and more convenient for our clients.
(Of course, this opinion is my own, not necessarily my employer's)
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 us that AJAX is preferable. I spent 8 months writing a moderately large CAD web app (that views and manipulates AutoCAD drawings) that was a combination of flash and ajax, and I tell you, flash is a MUCH better web app development platform. It comes with a much richer library of code (actual components), much more functionality (support for vector graphics), and since there are no competing flash player implementations (as there are competing browsers), you write code once and run it everywhere. And yes, for once that is not hype. There are some minor incompatibilities, but 95+ percent of the time your code will run completely correct on the other platforms first time you try it.
Also, many of the reasons people have historically rejected flash hold true for AJAX too, like poor support for browser history, poor support for the visually handicapped, and poor support for unusual platforms (you need firefox at the least, which does not run on embedded systems).
You're blind if you can't see the flash apps out there. Flash remains the most popular choice for web game development, for example.
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