Adobe Swallows Macromedia

Few companies have been a part of the Mac era for as long as Adobe and Macromedia. From Illustrator 88 and Macromind Director to Flash and Creative Suite 2, the two companies have provided the tools that helped establish the Mac as a graphic-design platform. So it’s no surprise that Adobe’s planned acquisition of Macromedia sent tremors through the Mac design community in April.

If all goes according to plan, come this fall Macromedia will be no more and Adobe will own not only its own stable of graphic- design applications, but also a barrel full of complementary and competitive programs. The $3.4 billion deal will bring an end to the rivalry of these two great companies. Can you say "Adobe Flash?"

What this acquisition means for the future of the two companies is, of course, up in the air. The official line from Adobe is suitably vague and filled with the usual corporate, feelgood, mind- tranquilizing verbiage: "greater synergy,""better workflow," and "broader solution."

Bryan Lamkin, Adobe’s senior vice president of digital imaging and video, added, "We want to help people communicate better, and that’s what Macromedia’s focus is as well. The opportunity for Adobe now is how can we bring a better solution to our customers."

Big News

From a strategic, corporate, mile-high perspective, the acquisition isn’t about capturing the competition or crushing competing programs; it’s a move by Adobe to gain ground in the growing market of Internet applications and the delivery of information over the Web. Adobe is a formidable presence in the graphic-arts world-there probably isn’t one design department in a Fortune 500 company that doesn’t use its products. And the de facto standard for electronic documents, Portable Document Format, is as ubiquitous as the IRS’s 1040 forms (which, of course, you can download in PDF from www.irs.gov).

But aside from Adobe’s video products, most of its technologies are stuck in "old media" and the static world of print. Adobe has captured that market; it’s time to move on. Macromedia, on the other hand, has put most of its resources into dynamic media: Web-design applications (Dreamweaver and Fireworks), online Web-conferencing and presentations (Breeze), server-based Web products (Cold Fusion, JRun, Flex), and, the jewel of the crown, Flash.

Without Flash, Adobe probably would not be interested. But this technology, which started out as nothing more than an animation program, has morphed into a powerful real-time information-delivery tool that can access data across the Web, read from and update databases, act as the front end for complex Web applications, and even run as a desktop program free from the constraints of a Web browser. Most of Macromedia’s development and marketing energy over the past few years has been directed toward promoting Flash (in suitable industry jargon) as a "Rich Internet Application," spawning related (and less well-known) technologies such as Flex (an ubergeek programming environment for Flash) and Central (a Flash-based desktop tool with similarities to Tiger’s Dashboard).

If Adobe is the darling of art departments, Macromedia is the up- and-coming star of the IT set. This is the kind of "synergy" Adobe is alluding to-left and right sides of the brain taking over the universe (or at least trying to hold its own against Microsoft).

TIGER APPLICATIONS

Since Tiger’s release, software companies both big and small have been updating their applications to work with Apple’s newest version of OS X. Macworld is tracking these updates closely and keeping a running list on our Web site. Check out macworld.com/0560 for an up- to-date index.

But this high-level corporate strategy stuff isn’t much consolation to us, the folks who use Photoshop, Fireworks, Director, and other Adobe and Macromedia applications. Newsgroups are abuzz with predictions about the two companies and their products. Users on both sides of the fence are rightfully concerned and wonder what will become of the products they cherish most-especially products like FreeHand and Illustrator, or Dreamweaver and GoLive, which compete head-to-head. It seems unlikely that Adobe would keep two illustration and two Web-design programs alive for long.

Adobe may attempt to integrate features from competing programs, and I’ve already seen some proposed new namesGoDream, Photo Works, or, my favorite name for a hybrid Web- and print-design superprogram: Sortaworks. Alternatively, Adobe may just scrap programs that compete with its own: bye-bye FreeHand. But a deal of this magnitude, which consolidates two powerful competing companies, is subject to regulatory approval. Adobe may be forced to sell off, rather than kill, direct competitors of its products.

Despite all the hand wringing, doom saying, and prognostications, it’s obviously too early to predict the future-but here’s what I see the future holding for these two companies:

All of Macromedia’s surviving products will get a face-lift. Adobe’s polished user interface will become the standard. This frees Macromedia’s programs from a 2002 court decision prohibiting the use of Adobe’s patented tabbed palette feature in any Macromedia product.

FreeHand will be discontinued or sold. Illustrator is already top dog, and integrating the code from two different programs is just too much work.

Fireworks will slowly disappear. Photoshop is Adobe’s star, and the vectororientation of Fireworks just doesn’t mesh with Photoshop’s workflow.

Acrobat Reader will incorporate the Flash player and vice versa. You’ll need only one plug-in to view both PDFs and Flash movies. Embedded Flash animations within PDF documents will follow.

Director? Who knows? This once king of multimedia production has been eclipsed by its nimble sibling, Flash.

Dreamweaver or GoLive? This one’s a toss-up. Dreamweaver has the dominant market share and (rightly or wrongly) is seen as the more professional of the two programs. But Dreamweaver’s core audience isn’t the same as the Creative Suite’s. The average Web developer in a corporate IT department doesn’t use Illustrator and certainly doesn’t care about InDesign. So perhaps the two programs will continue to coexist: GoLive for designers; Dreamweaver for programmers.

InDesign will be sold to Quark. No, just kidding about that one.

For consumers of digital-arts software, this consolidation means less competition. There will be one fewer company making software, giving the newly enlarged Adobe that much more dominance in the marketplace and making it difficult for smaller companies to compete. With fewer creative minds tackling the challenge of making truly great design software, and fewer CEOs willing to invest money in producing such software, the result could very well mean less choice for consumers.

Without Flash, Adobe wouldn’t be interested in Macromedia.

DAVID SAWYER McFARLAND has more than 15 years of experience in the graphic-arts field-with both Adobe and Macromedia products-in desktop publishing, prepress production, magazine design, and Web development.

Copyright IDG Communications/Peterborough Jul 2005