Re: Why should I be worried about the merger? What if?

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

> What if you had only one choice?  In many situations with software, that
> turns out to be true.  There is only One solution for professional
> editing of PDF files, and that's Acrobat.

No, there's Acrobat, Infix PDF Editor, Cadkas PDF Editor, Jaws PDF
Editor, Foxit PDF Editor, SCP PDF Editor, eXPert PDF Editor, and a
slew of others. "Professional" is subjective, because many
professionals buy Acrobat and only use it to Save As PDF or Distill a
print file to PDF.

> There is only One solution for professional design of Flash based
> files/apps, and that's Flash.

Macromedia opened up the SWF format a couple of years ago. Depending
on what you need to do, there are plenty of tools out there that will
allow you to get your job done.

> But what if everything was that way?  Only one audio format, one photo
> format, one wordprocessing format, etc...  And what if you had to pay a
> royalty to be able to access all the files on your computer, sort of a
> digital rights management protection on files that you create?  And
> everytime you use their software, it contacted the company that
> purchased it from to let them know, what, where and how long you used
> there program?

Are you saying that the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe will
whittle the tools down to one option? That's a very sad and negative
view. I see it as opening the doors for competition and innovation.

> ...and you can't or won't change to something else because you are so
> overly invested in now has control.

But why allow yourself that confinement in the first place? If you see
a dead end when driving, do you go all the way to the end, stop, and
then complain or do you stay your course while looking for alternate
routes, or perhaps turn around entirely?

> Maybe it sounds like doom and gloom and 1984, but why does my Go Live
> product always "check-in" with Adobe on startup?  Why does Microsoft
> have such a restrictive and registration process?  Why are many
> different music files filled with DRM that requires a log in to another
> computer system in order to listen to them?

It's called validation, synchronization, live updates, and
security/copy protection. All these machanisms are in place to protect
the vendor's sale of their technology, prohibit widespread piracy, and
keep you up to date with patches.

> I don't think I'm the only one to think that this could happen.  If the
> business model changes, and we pay for use, rather than an unlimited
> license for a version, under the guise of thwarting piracy, then I would
> be very concerned.

Why? I'm a MSDN subscriber and I think it's wonderful! I pay a monthly
fee for my Universal subscription and I have access to pretty much any
MS technology I want... Office apps, SDKs, IDEs, sneak peeks of
Longhorn before the pblic sneak peeks, and a ton of other
technologies. The only things that aren't covered seem to be Microsoft
Games and other completely non-business MS apps.

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