Adobe to Acquire Macromedia ... What's the Impact?

[rcrisler1]

Adobe announced today that it will acquire Macromedia, developer of Dreamweaver, Flash and Coldfusion.

Our best guess is that we'll see mergers of Dreamweaver and GoLive, Illustrator and Freehand, and ImageReady and Fireworks, and that Adobe will re-brand ColdFusion, Flash, Contribute and Director.

While it's premature to suggest any directions for our web development recommendations, which include the use of Dreamweaver for a visual web editor, and our templates, which are commented as DWT (Dreamweaver Template) files, we'll use this thread to post strategies as Adobe's product directions become clear.

[MarkHiatt]

So far all I know for sure is that the resulting company won't be called Macrobe.

It'll be interesting to see how this all shakes out, though. My favorite editor, HomeSite, was built by an outfit that Macromedia bought some years ago. As far as I know, HomeSite was always included in every box of Dreamweaver, going back to at least v2. I'm worried now that we won't see another one.

Dreamweaver and Fireworks are wonderfully integrated. It would be a shame to see that go away, but I fear it might because Fireworks has been steadily eating away at the market Photoshop took from PhotoPaint and the others almost a decade ago. Photoshop is huge, both in market share and as a program, and I don't think it can be worked into the Dreamweaver workflow experience as easily. We go from Dreamweaver to Fireworks as easily as moving from Photoshop into ImageReady. I'd hate to see them drop Fireworks, but I'm sure they don't think they need two competing boxes on the shelves of America's BestBuys. Maybe there'll be some work to make Fireworks more Photoshop-like?

Flash is going to be with us forever, I'd bet. The open-source alternative isn't up to speed yet and it's a happy brand. Contribute has a lot of fans, too. I don't know anybody who uses GoLive and loves it.

In the end, though, I wonder if even they know what they're going to do with everything, yet? We're living in the Chinese curse of "Interesting Times", I guess.

[dsockrider]

http://www.adobe.com/products/bundles/main.html

I just hope Adobe doesn't mess up Freehand, Flash and Dreamweaver. Time to backup my old copies of those programs.

[rcrisler1]

I mean, who wants BOTH FreeHand and Illustrator? My bet is that FreeHand has seen its last version. And I use and prefer FreeHand. But I can live with Illustrator. I might even learn to prefer it.

[dsockrider]

Yes, I've had to use Illustrator and Freehand both for 2d line art illustration, I always prefered Freehand, it just seemed more basic and easier to use than Illustrator.