20:54
Company formerly known as Macromedia
They’ve done it. Adobe has completed the acquisiton of Macromedia. Here’s what they say:
This is one marriage where it could have paid off for the audience to clear their throats and "speak now or forever hold their peace".
Some creatives might see this acquisition as the best thing since fried chicken. It unites competing software, file formats and workflows, thereby easing the load of users. Others (yours truly included) might be a bit more apprehensive. What’s to stop Adobe from becoming another Microsoft, using unfair licensing agreements and proprietary standards to kill competition? Adobe has shown in the past that they don’t really “get” the Web as a medium. Will their takeover of Macromedia stifle online design development?
Ok, so PDF, PostScript and SWF are all open formats, but can we expect things to stay that way? What will happen to SVG now that Adobe controls both SVG and SWF no longer has any real reason to champion it? (Not that it was such a big success to begin with.)
Sure, Adobe could teach Macromedia a thing or two about software development. Flash / Director and ActionScript / Lingo are both slightly eccentric development environments / programming languages, and could do with some cleaning up (to be fair, Director more so than Flash). Flash integration with After Effects would prove a real boost to both motion designers and artists who use Flash and want to make DVD content. But won’t the ultimate result be a vice grip on content developers, with practically all competition taken out of the market?
The “new” Adobe is already offering three software bundles that seem to suffer from a massive identity crisis. The packaging design is way off, and the product motto seems to be “Flash 8 with everything”. The future’s so bright…
Some analysis:
This scares me too.
Adobe controls SVG?
I don’t think so.
Read http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
You’re right, stelt, Adobe does not control SVG. But Adobe’s control over Flash is bound to have an impact on the success of SVG. Adobe won’t have much of an impetus to actively support it. Interestingly, it might be the mobile phone vendors who have the most reason to support SVG. But then it again it’s probably a matter of time before PDF and Flash make it big in mobile terminals too.
a wager: Adobe drops support of SVG – Microsoft takes it up big time.
[...] Thanks to Marius Watz’s post over at Generator.x (The Company Formerly Known as Macromedia), I noticed that Macromedia has finally been swallowed whole by Adobe. That I didn’t get to this information about 30 seconds afer-the-fact, but rather several days afterwards, is testimony to how far I’ve travelled on this subject. The first time I had wandered off like this was during the terror and agony of waiting for Director to be ported to Mac OS X. It was probably the best thing that could have happened to me, as I learned several languages and environments in the hiatus. But now, this time around, I’ve more or less nailed the coffin shut as far as Director’s future is concerned. [...]