OMG, Adobe buys Macromedia for 3.4bn

[UtwigMU]

Adobe has taken over Macromedia:
Press release

CNet
ZDNet
INQUIRER

This leaves the print and web publishing field pretty barren of competition (with Quark and Corel kicking for how long).

[schmosef]

omg is right. the industry is truly shaking up.

[Jessterw]

I think the more appropriate response would be a four letter word that would get censored right quick. Can't see how anything good will come out of this.

[lecter]

What, you mean you can't see the benefits of one company practically owning the web/graphics design sector of the market? Like Alan Alda said in the Aviator "Monopoly? Noo...we're just saying that just one company can do it better"

BTW, interesting how they kept this mega-deal completely under wraps, didn't notice any rumors about this...

[dbdg]

Oh dear, can't see this being good!

[omegaRED]

****. Well, we better stick to MX2004 versions. I too dont see anything good coming out of this....

[ZokesPro]

I don't get it, why is this bad?

[schmosef]

Yeah,

I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Just surprising.

We'll have to wait and see how it plays out to make any further determinations.

Mergers of this size don't always go so well. Often the market value of the new company ends up being less than the value of the two companies when they were separate. This happens a lot when there's a big overlap in products and/or services. Since these companies are very different, I think that there's a good opportunity here. But also a big chance for risk.

Strategically for Macromedia, this might be the best thing possible in prep for what MS is planning with their Avalon technology.

[UtwigMU]

Because Adobe now that they got Macromedia under wraps has little competition (Corel = almost dead, ditto Quak, besides Draw+Quark+Photoshop+Dreamweaver = more expensive than Adobe suite).

They've gone from expand to maximize profits phase, expect worse licensing (activation, subscription...) and higher pricing with less innovation.

[ZokesPro]

Hmm, well, I guess only time can tell, but from what you guys have mentioned already it doesn't sound like a very positive move.

[schmosef]

Because Adobe now that they got Macromedia under wraps has little competition (Corel = almost dead, ditto Quak, besides Draw+Quark+Photoshop+Dreamweaver = more expensive than Adobe suite).

They've gone from expand to maximize profits phase, expect worse licensing (activation, subscription...) and higher pricing with less innovation.

I totally understand what you mean by less innovation and higher costs, but I don't think that they were really in direct competition. Maybe I'm wrong. As I understand it, they were both in content creation, but Adobe was more about static content and Macromedia was about dynamic content. It can be argued that Flash MX2004 is good enough to compete directly with Illustrator. I don't know if that's true but I have a book that's designed to teach the use of Flash for that purpose (I plan to learn it over the summer).

What I'm saying is that the situation of over priced software due to lack of competition already existed. MS will probably never beat Adobe is the design software space, but they have a chance to kill Flash and cold fusion as a web development platform. This seems like a good strategy for Macromedia. If Avalaon turns out to be as good as MS is claiming, Flash could be completely marginalized. If the new adobe finds a way to make their new suite of products work really seamlessly, it could breath new life into the Flash platform.

[schmosef]

I'm an old school PSP user. I really hope that Corel doesn't bork it.

[UtwigMU]

They were pretty much complementary:
Phtoshop - Fireworks
Illustrator - Freehand
GoLive - Dreamweaver
Macromedia has Flash and Coldfusion, which Adobe doesn't and Adobe has layout and document apps - PDF, InDesign, Pagemaker and videoediting apps, which Macromedia doesn't.

The only positive thing is Adobe becoming stronger and better probabilty of Microsoft being less capable of ramming some proprietary document on the market and stronger Adobe being present in web authoring.

For consumers this means less inovation and higher prices for software.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Woohoo, I hope they merge Acrobat reader and Flash together, I'd just love to see PDF's with animations in them!

[UtwigMU]

In Ars news discussion I saw this is already being worked on, but didn't follow links.

What would be more interesting would be lean unobtrusive flash plugin being able to display .pdf files in browser instead of readers.