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Adobe aquires Macromedia

This time around, it's no joke! It's all over the blogs now: Adobe aquires Macromedia for $3.4 billion in stock.

This has been the longest standing joke in the community and now it actually happens. What'll this mean then? These are just guesses, but if you're using Freehand or Fireworks - start learning Illustrator and Photoshop. That battle should now be closed. There is quite some overlap between the companies product lines, so most probably, something like half the Macromedia tools will disappear. Since Adobe is the one aquiring, they will probably be the ones controlling what tools get to live and not. This may also cause problems.

The biggest hurdle in this merger will definetly be the different company cultures. Back when Macromedia merged with Allaire, this process went pretty smooth since the companies had a fairly similar culture. Adobe and Macromedia is a different story. From what we have heard from people on the inside, the cultures are very different.

One good example of this is is the openness of the companies. Macromedia sees blogs as an important tool to communicate with their users. Adobe does not. A Google search for Adobe Blog returns 57 results, none of them official blogs from Adobe. A search for Macromedia blog will return more than 700 results with the first ones listing the official Macromedia Blogs and the Macromedia RSS aggregator MXNA. We certainly hope that the blogs won't die. That would be the biggest single mistake Adobe could do in this process.

What will the deal mean for Flash then? Good question... Adobe is the biggest company pushing the SVG technology, but they have no tool for creating SVG content. Flash would be an ideal match and adding SVG output to Flash shouldn't be a massive task. It'll just be a plugin and another export option. Other than that - we have no idea what it'll mean. It's been quite some time since Adobe killed off LiveMotion rather abruptly. Flash and the business opportunities around it, is probably one of the major reasons Adobe wants Macromedia. LiveMotion failed not because it was poor software, but rather since Adobe did not control the SWF format. Now they will have that. Mike Chambers says on his blog: We are still committed to Flash as a development platform (probably more than ever now). We are still committed to our server products, such as ColdFusion (7 has been incredibly successful) and Flex.

This points to another interesting aspect of the merger: Adobe has little or no history in making middleware and serverside software. We look forward to see what the combined forces of Adobe and Macromedia can do to push products such as Breeze and FlashCom. These are the two most promising pieces of software Macromedia has today and they will change how we use the web.

Keep in mind that this is just an announcement that both companies want this. It's not like they'll actually merge today. That process will take time and it could also (in theory) be stopped by US authorities. We are very excited by this deal and look forward to follow the merger!
Read the official information

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (April 18th 2005)