Adobe announced today that they will be buying Macromedia for US$3.4 billion. these two former adversaries (in the legal space, too) will become one company in the autumn.
At first glance it seems to be a combination fraught with overlapping market areas, but maybe not… There are a few software products which are sure to be eliminated: Freehand comes immediately to mind, since it has been the perennial also-ran in illustration software and it does nothing that Adobe Illustrator can’t do. Plus, it doesn’t have half the market of plug-ins as Illustrator. LiveMotion, Adobe’s lame attempt at a Flash clone, has been moribund for a while — if not already officially dead, so that is a no-brainer.
Dreamweaver has a commanding share of the HTML development market, so GoLive may be allowed to die, or Adobe may string it along for a few years as they did with PageMaker when InDesign came out. Or perhaps they may re-think GoLive as one of their “Elements” line of programs, aiming it towards the home user level. (Maybe tieing it in as a blog-creating program focused on their neighbors at Google‘s Blogger platform?)
Then, there’s Fireworks. We’ve been having some… ahem… disagreements at my office over standardizing on Fireworks or Photoshop. I’m squarely in the Photoshop camp (actually, I am the Photoshop camp), but I do recognize that Fireworks is far superior in its creation and optimization for web images. Adobe has a lame product in that space — ImageReady — which isn’t even sold alone, but stands as a sort of half-assed sidekick to Photoshop. I never use it. So, perhaps replacing ImageReady with Fireworks would give us graphics folks the best of both worlds. (FireReady? ImageWorks? ReadyAimFire?)
While thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of each company’s stable of products, I realized that one thing Macromedia has which Adobe doesn’t is programmable software. Macromedia has Director, with its Lingo language, Flash/Flex with ActionScript, and ColdFusion with its CFML and application development platform. (Strange since Adobe was founded on the programming language PostScript. This may be Adobe’s most significant gain in the purchase.
Closer to home is the uncertain future of Macromedia’s less popular and non-graphics/non-programming packages, such as RoboHelp, JRun, and Authorware. Authorware is the last surviving eLearning program from a major software house, and it was the first one I worked on when I started doing eLearning. Macromedia has never figured out how to properly integrate it with its other technologies — like letting it run in the Flash player instead of its own bloated plugin — so maybe Adobe will figure out how… or kill it.