Birmingham Web Designer Jeremy Flint blogs here. He works for Kinetic Communications. He organizes events and programs for IPSA. He takes pictures and posts them on Flickr. He also blogs about Hiking and Mississippi State Sports when he has the time. He recommends Dreamhost for all your hosting needs. Make sure you grab the RSS Feed.

So it was announced this morning that Adobe will aquire Macromedia in an all stock deal. Immediately people started posting about it everywhere. Everyone has different concerns, of course. What is going to happen to Fireworks? Will Dreamweaver be dumped in favor of GoLive? Is there a PDF/Flash interface solution in the future (submitting PDF forms over the web using Flash to control the form fields, for example)?

Adobe and Macromedia have a long history. Both are leaders in the field of design software, but each seem to have a seperate core audience. Photoshop is of course used by both print and web designers, although there are increasing numbers of web designers turning to Fireworks for its vector abilities and better PNG support. However aside from Photoshop, Adobe seems to be more of a print/graphic design oriented software company, going head-to-head with QuarkXpress by introducing InDesign. They quickly got out of the Flash market by discontinuing development of their LiveMotion.

Macromedia, on the other hand, has leaned more and more towards web and interactive development. Sure, they have Freehand, but I don’t really hear much about it these days. I do like that you can create multi-page documents in it, which you can not do in Illustrator. They have pushed development of Dreamweaver to where it is a great developing environment not only for HTML, but for other programming languages as well. Flash has continued to be refined into a solid web application tool, and Fireworks seems to have become the designer’s pet for some with its strong support for the PNG format and its vector controls.

In addition to fierce competition on the software front, the two companies have also had their fair share of legal battles. I am sure everyone remembers the patent infringement case that Adobe threw at Macromedia back in 2000, claiming the company had copied the tabbed palette window interface. They eventually settled out of court before it ever went to trial.

So, what will Adobe do with Macromedia and its wide range of products? Will they just allow it to exist as a division of Adobe, using it to cater more to the interactive designer and begin pushing its core products to the graphic design crowd? Will they try to combine products or ditch some products all together?

I guess we will just have to watch this develop and see what happens.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at April 18,2005 @ 9:01 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.