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>Adobe and Macromedia announced today that Adobe will acquire Macromedia
for 3.4 billion US
>dollars. Links on Adobe.com and Macromedia.com both point to
>the following URL:
>Here is the techwriter-related question: How do you think the tools you
use regularly will change? >Do you think Adobe will discontinue Freehand
and
>Fireworks in favor of Illustrator and Photoshop? What about Go Live and
Dreamweaver?
>Do you think that the change is healthy for the graphics/web
development market (with the end
>result being one company with an enormous market share)? Do
>you think this is a good change or not?
Adobe vs. Macromedia
I never thought that this was an odd pairing of powerhouse software
companies. My first impression of the two companies however is that
Adobe tends to be the better Off-Line design company, touting Acrobat as
the de-facto standard for platform independent documents.
Macromedia tends to be a better on-line company, touting Flash/Shockwave
as the de-fact standard for online presentations. (Flash Player is
installed on over 70% of web browsers).
So does bringing these two companies together benefit or hurt the
creative community? Sure there is shareware out there that is quite
capable, but these two companies are plainly driving the development of
technology. I personally believe that Adobe will continue to keep the
products separate for at least a year, and then they will merge the
product lines into online and offline publishing. But I also think they
are poised to do two other things. 1st, they will bridge the gap
between screen and paper. I would imagine that they will have a product
that can produce easy to print versions of webpages without having to
dual author. Secondly, I believe that Adobe will launch a 3 tier
software approach to the creative community, ie, Professional (high end
stuff), Semi-Pro (Less expensive, but missing some high end features),
finally Consumer end (packed with features, maybe even free to gain
market share).
I think that unique products will stay unique, but in most cases I
believe that Adobe will absorb the best features of the Macromedia
products into existing Adobe products where it makes the most sense. If
I had to choose between the product that both companies have, I would
say that Photoshop, Illustrator are better than Fireworks and Freehand.
I think that Dreamweaver handle CSS better than Go Live, but both are
excellent programs. There is nothing that compare to Flash, and it is
an extraordinarily powerful program, bar none.
I am always suspect when we lose competition in the marketplace.
Hopefully this may inspire other small developers to step up to the
plate and produce incredible web development technologies. Let's just
hope they don't change the name of the company to Macrosoft.
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