Adobe buys Macromedia

✎ Published: 2005-04-18 10:30:30

Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia raises questions about the future of key products. Photoshop is likely to overshadow Fireworks, while the fate of Freehand and Illustrator remains uncertain. The competition between Dreamweaver and GoLive hints at possible consolidation, and Flash appears poised to dominate unless Adobe opts differently. Concerns about innovation and product treatment linger.

Adobe buys Macromedia

Aw; I don't know how to rate this yet, but seems as if Adobe is going to buy Macromedia. A buyout usually leads to the End-Of-Life of most of the bought companies products - or the merging of both companies technologies. As Adobe is the company who buys Macromedia it's clear that they'll always favourize their products instead the Macromedia ones.

Lets see what we have here:


Photoshop vs Fireworks

Photoshop is gonna be the clear winner, being one of the stealth Adobe products. I don't know enough about  Fireworks to judge which functions might be worth being implemented in Photoshop, or even if there's a use in continuing the Fireworks line though.


Freehand vs. Illustrator:

Tough decision. I know that Freehand is widely accepted especially in the fashion industry. And I think that these two applications are quite seperate in terms of use and basic concepts. However, I think that merging these two applications could turn out to give birth to a damn fine application as there're things I love in Illustrator which I miss in Freehand, and there're things I love in Freehand which I miss in Illustrator.


Dreamweaver vs. GoLive:

Well, tough question; I love Dreamweaver, although I don't really use it that much, but that's because I'm hardly doing design stuff anymore, I'm mostly coding pure php or python or c, which works far better with specialiced editors. However, everytime I have to do Html/CSS on a bigger scale I tend use Dreamweaver as it features many nice tools which help tremendously in the creation process. Golive, on the other hand, sounds to be quite good too, but seems to be quite different to Dreamweaver; So doing a switch wouldn't be that easy. Adobe probably prefers GoLive which could mark the death of Dreamweaver; Who knows, but if - what a pity.


Flash vs. (I Forgot The Name):

There was that Flash competitor from Adobe (LiveMotion?). 100% Looser. Flash wins on all battlefields. Although I don't like the Flash MX 2004 IDE that much, but Flash 8 promises to be a helluva of a good product. If Adobe are going to stall the Flash Application in favour of Livemotion they're  "A bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."


I hope that they're not going to treat the Macromedia products just like Macromedia treated HomeSite back when they bought it.. Lets see what the future brings. And I'm not even getting into monopoly problems like lack of innovation;