Adobe to Buy Macromedia

It was announced earlier this week that Adobe is going to be buying Macromedia for US$3.4 million. As a manager of a Macromedia User Group (the "Corporate Champions" group at Discover Financial Services, Inc.'s Riverwoods, Illinois headquarters), I've been reading a lot of newsgroup messages about the planned October, 2005 takeover. There is a lot of paranoia and presupposition right now about the company known for expensive packages like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere. The Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) is practically a worldwide standard in platform-independent document sharing, and recently opensource projects have back-engineered the PDF making it very accessible. In fact, Macromedia's own ColdFusion 7.0 (just released) natively supports production of PDF documents, as does Macromedia's Flashpaper--designed to leverage the Flash player, which has near market saturation, and compete with Adobe Acrobat.

Web designers and developers have overwhelmingly cast their dollar/yen/ruble/euro votes in favor of Macromedia Dreamweaver, casting aside products like Microsoft FrontPage and Adobe GoLive. Dreamweaver advocates such as myself will be attentive to Adobe's plan for the flagship HTML package. GoLive absorbing Dreamweaver would be devastating to the development community. Dreamweaver, though, has in the past absorbed other products.

When Macromedia acquired Allaire's ColdFusion, the attempt was made to make Dreamweaver MX the development tool for ColdFusion. Basically this involved adding a few CFML extensions and giving the option of the "HomeSite"-style development arrangement of docked toolbars and grouping. This attempt at the dream of integrating the old ColdFusion Studio with Dreamweaver may never satisfy some diehards, even after the improvements in Dreamweaver MX 2004. (It's worth noting here that DW MX 2004 also combines Nick Bradbury's TopStyle functionality, too. Nick, you may recall, was the author of HomeSite).

So if there is to be a marriage of GoLive and Dreamweaver, it may be that Dreamweaver can adopt a GoLive-style development environment, bringing these users into the fold. A quick check of the classified ads for developers will not mention GoLive, rather it will ask for Dreamweaver developers. Let us hope in the next 6 months that Adobe shares the outlook that Dreamweaver absorbing GoLive is the route to take and not the
other way around.

What will surely be interesting is the fate of products like Macromedia Fireworks and Macromedia Freehand. Though these tools are nicely integrated with sister products Dreamweaver and Flash, the superiority of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator will certainly shine through. Fireworks will almost certainly be absorbed into Photoshop, and though this might be a good mix, it will make a more cost-effect package out of reach to some developers who do not have US$800 to spend on Photoshop. The same can be said of Illustrator and its step-sister Freehand.

However the chips fall, this consolidation could be seen as a positive move toward competition with software giant Microsoft and its fleet of end-to-end solutions. Possibly we're looking at the genesis of the next software giant. This will certainly be a great process to watch and participate in.