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.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2005 at 11:03 and is tagged .

5 Responses to “Adobe kills Macromedia”

  1. Think Different. Says:
    April 20th, 2005 at 15:14

    Adobe Macromedia = Hmm…

    I was alerted to this merger/buyout today by a classmate and my first reaction was a combination of fear and nervousness. But mom tells me to be more optimistic, so I gave it a try

  2. Tim Says:
    April 20th, 2005 at 16:46

    I guess I’m not a real web designer then… :) I just have never been able to ‘get’ Dreamweaver’s interface, to me it is clunky and nearly unusable. To each his own, right? :)

    Although, I will say the very first thing I thought when I heard about this was that Golive was dead. I just don’t see them ending a product like Dreamweaver that is somewhat of an industry standard.

  3. Jeremiah Says:
    April 21st, 2005 at 11:17

    When I first opened Dreamweaver 3, I was overwhelmed with floating palettes. Each version of Dreamweaver has brought improved user interface. The MX interface consistent through all MX Studio is logical and unintrusive. You should give Dreamweaver MX 2004 a try… especially when there is no way that GoLive is going to trump Dreamweaver in this buyout.

  4. Jeremiah Says:
    April 21st, 2005 at 16:01

    Mac360 has an excellent analysis of the buyout.

  5. Jeremiah Says:
    April 26th, 2005 at 1:46

    Macworld: Adobe aims at Microsoft

    This is an interesting update. I *hope* that Adobe is aiming at Microsoft and not going to shift from Macromedia’s dedication to open-standards. If Microsoft owns the underlying technology that you are building your empire upon, you better be ready to lose when competing head-to-head with Microsoft. Three cheers for J2EE!