Adobe kills Macromedia
Wired: Adobe Acquires Macromedia
Today is a day of mourning; mourning the loss of my second favorite company (Macromedia) to Adobe. Adobe rightly conceded the new media market because Macromedia sold products that interoperated with everyone (PHP? JSP? ASP? ColdFusion? Dreamweaver does them all), encouraged strict adherence to W3C standards (GoLive makes real web designers cry), and made rich media less about the constraints and more about the possibilities of the medium. Macromedia’s greatest strength was its focus: every geek and art tool to make interactive media work. Adobe failed at new media (GoLive, LiveMotion), made a laughable attempt at 3D (Dimension, Atmosphere), and continues to fail at being Apple (Final Cut (originally a Macromedia product) beats Premier, DVD Studio Pro beats Encore, Logic beats Audition, Shake and Motion beat After Effects, etc.). Adobe only brings blurred vision to Macromedia.
Adobe has become more and more Windows-only the last few years, while Macromedia has been committed to Mac OS X. I cannot even express my excitement when Macromedia bloggers solicited feedback on certifying ColdFusion for use on Mac OS X Server. (For the record, ColdFusion already runs nicely on Mac OS X.)
Adobe is the only benefitting member of this new relationship. I hope that Adobe will be smart enough to kill it remaining competing products in favor of Macromedia’s. As for the future of my beloved MX Suite, my crystal ball is blurry. I predict Flash will gain Photoshop layer style support for huge-ass exports and SVG support because no one uses it. I see Flash Paper disappearing and PDF forms arising from ColdFusion. One can only hope that Adobe does not distract the ColdFusion team and force them to make it run on Microsoft .Net.
Posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 at 11:03.