August 11th 2001 | Jarle Dahl Bergersen

Allaire becomes Macromedia

Interview with Jeremy Allaire

With the .com industry settling down, and the Klondike of .com turning into any other business with the same laws of economics it is time for the big companies to come together. Earlier this year Allaire and Macromedia turned into one big company. West coast and East coast met each other, and two partners had suddenly become one. During Flashforward 2001 in NYC, Flashmagazine was fortunate enough to be allowed to meet Jeremy Allaire, founder of Allaire and now Chief Technical officer of the new Macromedia.

FM: There have been a lot of things happening over the last year, with the Web, the .com community and Allaire, how would you recap the last year?
JA: The last year for the industry has been real jarring for a lot of people. We went through a period of over investment and irrational optimism and that continued to snowball and the natural effect are playing themselves out, so you know, we have a period of adjustment that we are going through. And that's great; I think it's good and healthy that we are going through that adjustment. It has been painful for a lot of people, it has changed our perception, but we think that is turning into an opportunity to create a highly differentiated platform that is affordable and accessible to a lot of people, that emphasizes real value, real quality user experience, form and function, and having the technology to make that straightforward.

FM: Is the .com meltdown the prime reason for Allaire and Macromedia merging?
JA: No, I wouldn't say it's the prime reason, I think there is a couple of things to note. I wouldn't characterize it as the .com meltdown because we're in a near recession on a worldwide basis and the vast majority of that has nothing to do with .coms. It's a real recession, it's real companies, consumer companies, not just high-tech companies, across the board, it's a slowing of demand and the investment levels and the dollars created out of the stock market are evaporating and so that is just a broad market trend. I think specific to Macromedia and Allaire, the changing dynamics of the economy definitely played a critical role in the timing of the merger. It seems that when you are going into a period of difficult economic times that you want to be a much stronger company coming out of that, whereas if you're potentially in a weak position, you can become even weaker because of that economy, so we looked at the power of us combined as much more interesting than individually, and we think that is going to be very important coming out of this economy.

And the other reason is when you are in a tough economy the customers get a lot more conservative and that means we are going to transition in the market from early adopters to the early majority, which is a much more pragmatic audience and that tends to lead to costumers that want to buy aggregated platforms, that want to buy suites of stuff that are well integrated in systems, and to get the cost benefits that comes from that. We think that the business model that we have of putting this together actually plays into those dynamics as well. But the merger is about a lot of things, that goes back many years, both the relationship between the companies, the complimentary nature of our different products and technologies and how they can have the potential to create a good platform. Those are really the primary roles as opposed to the economy.

FM: You are talking about products, right now, the product line of what has become Macromedia is very diversified, and a lot of the products, although they talk to each other, don't really connect with each other. How do you see the future for those products?
JA: Actually in the last couple of years the Macromedia heritage products vs. the Allaire heritage products have come a long way in terms of the integration, so the workflow between doing vector illustrations in Freehand and then using them in Macromedia Flash has improved a lot, the workflow between building graphics in Fireworks and using them in Dreamweaver and going between those, clearly Dreamweaver and UltraDev has strict superset of one another, so there has been integration points and increasingly more forms of Flash inside Dreamweaver, taking advantage of that. But the biggest thing has been the common user interface, standardized on all the tools around the common UI model for productivity. Within the Macromedia heritage products there has been a good amount of integration. Now obviously we have added a whole bunch of other products into the mix, and yes, when you merge a company, you got existing products and they sell and they are in the market for a year or however long. And then you have the opportunity as a new company to reconfigure what you are building and combine technologies and simplify your product lines and provide explicit forms of integration, so obviously you would expect that's a good part of what we are doing as we look at the future.

FM: When you are talking about simplifying your product lines, does that entail taking products of the market?
JA: It really varies, in some cases it might. For example, our Spectra product is still available as a product today, but we have communicated to our customers that we are making a large, core part of the functionality just a feature of ColdFusion, and that we'll continue to sell and support the existing product, but we are not going to continue to add new features (to Spectra), we are going to add those features to ColdFusion instead. That's a kind of example of where you are simplifying product lines. In other places, like HomeSite, has a million users, it's a really popular product, it would be crazy for us to try and change that for the customers, so we want to better integrate the HomeSite and the Studio editing environment and IDE into the other tools, we want to make that a more constant product line and family for a programmer and developer. So there is a lot more integration that we can do there and bundling and things like that. But that doesn't mean that you're going to take away a product.

FM: Can we expect HomeSite to support Flash ActionScript?
JA: That's a good question, what I can say is we definitely want to provide much better programmer tools and editing tools for ActionScript, we think that's a clear gap right now, the HomeSite editor is a great general purpose coding editor centered on the web and the internet, so there is an opportunity to leverage some of that. We definitely want to improve the editing experience for ActionScript.

FM: What can we expect when it comes to Macromedia and Flash integration to server side functionality, Allaire has had the JRun server and ColdFusion. How is that going to integrate into Flash?
JA: This is I think a big part of what is interesting about the merger; personally I have tracked Macromedia Flash for quite some time and over the last year it really started to play a central role in how I thought about the future of the web and I believed the kind of things that Macromedia was doing with Flash 4, but then Flash 5 even further is broadening it's capabilities to build interactive applications, so all of the sudden it's a natural thing emerging where you got, I hate to use the phrase, client server applications where you are using Flash for user interface and user interactivity in application interfaces and you need servers for doing server side logic, data access, and persistence, integration with messaging systems and all the things that you do, accessing web services, all these kinds of things. Those are really natural places to go with Flash and so we saw that as a real opportunity.

When you look at Flash today it's actually pretty hard to build a good server application to work with Flash. It's like gum and bailing wire; you've got a lot to do to put stuff together, even though you have HTTP and XML, it's a lot of work just to move database record-sets between Flash and a server. So we think there is a lot of room for improvement there. Now that we have a player platform, we've got the authoring tools environment and we have the server runtime and tools to support that, we've got a good opportunity to integrate that better.

FM: So what you are talking about is more functionality within Flash to communicate on different protocols and the same thing on the server side?
JA: I won't talk specifically about what technology we envision, but we definitely think that the life of someone that wants to use server side logic and databases, and is using Flash as a deployment platform and authoring platform, will improve a lot.

FM: Maybe you could say a few words about the relationship between Macromedia and Microsoft, do you see them as a competitor, or someone you co-operate with?
JA: Macromedia is a really unique company, historically it's a unique company. I think, today it's a very unique company because it has historically really tried to play a Switzerland-role in the software industry. And that is really a part of it's identity. Macromedia looks for platform divides, the Mac and Windows, Netscape and IE, Dot Net and Java. So we look at these platform divides, and become the developer's friend by making it easy to sit on top of those and be abstracted from those. And so that is really consistent with Macromedia's strategy in the future. That means that Macromedia products are fundamentally open products that can co-exist with, and live within these separate platforms, so what that means for Microsoft is in a lot of cases we really integrate really well with what they are doing, with the web-server, with their database platform, with their operating systems - both on the server, and the authoring tools, and the player. And that's important to customers; so there is a real strong partnership around that, and they have been a partner around Flash even as well, so there is definitely a strong partnership there. But we are in the software business, and Microsoft is the largest software company in the world, so there are always some areas of overlap, Dreamweaver and (Microsoft) FrontPage, ColdFusion and ASP, there is competition there at some level. There are products and technologies that compete in some areas, and in other cases which are very supportive of their effort. Microsoft is a massive company and there are so many different product groups and political interests within the organization, so it's not a monolithic relationship that you have. We have sold almost 100,000 ColdFusion servers, that's a hundred thousand copies of Windows NT on the internet, and it's probably tens-of-thousands of SQL server copies, and lots of business that gets driven there. So, we have a relationship that is along those lines.

I think Dot NET for example represents a really big opportunity for Macromedia, I think the web services infrastructure is very compelling, I think that is gonna be a good model for software in the future and so we will want our various technologies to be able to offer that, consume that and so on. So that's an opportunity. Flash sits as an Active-X control today and you can embed it in Windows applications as Dot NET, and you take advantage of the same kind of services as that comes forward. It's a mosaic of elements in this relationship.

FM: So you see the same kind of future for Flash in different devices, as Microsoft is seeing for Dot NET? With web services on your cell phone, your PDA, your home computer, web pads etc.
JA: I think there are a number of really inter-connected pieces here. And it's a problem that we struggled with a lot, and we think we have some really good solutions for. But in the kind of second-generation web which we are still in for the most part, everything was built in a kind of silo that was self contained. So your application logic was wedded to your presentation, like your HTML page. And there wasn't real inherent structure to your sites and applications, so that elements could be easily reused both in different presentations tiers but also executing tiers in the environment.

And so Dot NET is one attempt, and there are others, and we've got interesting stuff in this area to make it easier for people to build dynamic content and applications that can provide back-ends for multiple formats, so I want to use the same, if I got a dynamic content application for running news on my site, I want that to be able to work with HTML, I also want it to be able to work with Flash really easily and how do I build that and structure my content and my logic to be able to do that very easily? Web Services are part of the answer to that, that's the public facing protocol that a client can use to involve a service and access data, there are other pieces to it as well. That part of Dot NET is important, and we're pretty much on top of the same kind of problem area. When we merged the companies we made it very clear that our vision was to make it easy for people to build these dynamic content applications across multiple formats, and we saw the primary formats being HTML and Flash, and multiple devices.

So we believe that versions of HTML and Flash will be in many different types of devices and so the authoring experience and the development model and so on needs to evolve to encompass that, it's not there today obviously.

FM: Another good thing about the merger between Macromedia and Allaire is what you see happening right now is the web is going away from people publishing single pages, to publishing content over different formats and actually deploying web applications.
JA: You know there are lots of different types of web applications out there. There are full blown business applications, and that's a lot of what people build on intranet's. Customer service apps, and HR apps and sales force automation, there are all these business categories, then there are internet sites that are both portals, and content and commerce and lots of diversity there, there are all these dynamic content applications, they all have a lot of these kind of aspects to them. And yes, pretty much all the web is moving to that over several years. Only a minority percent is done that way today, and Macromedia believes that close to a 100% will be done that way in the future and obviously we want to be one of the primary enablers of that.

FM: Up till now, that kind of architecture, especially when you talk about content, has been limited to people that have the skills, have the servers etc. Do you see Macromedia moving in for the more common public for those kind of applications?
JA: Allaire for the last 5 years has had it's core part of the philosophy that the internet was a mass phenomenon, that every institution, every organization, every individual in the world had the potential to use the internet to communicate and collaborate and conduct interactions and transactions. This was a mass phenomenon, and so we believed that the software that people use to take advantage of that should be built in a way that it can be a mass technology as well, and that meant two things primarily. One was that the technology be really straight forward, so that the common team, individual or organization could get something that they could learn and use and find powerful as well.

And second, that it be priced in a way that anyone could get involved with it. $500, $1000, whatever it is, not a huge outlay to get involved. That's been a core part of our philosophy, it's also a core part of Macromedia's philosophy, so we have a very shared vision for the internet and how technology plays into that. ColdFusion that was the essence of it. It was a mass phenomenon and mass product, so we think that can play a really central role in making it much more accessible to a much broader range of people than it is today.

FM: We have been talking about devices, and right now you have Flash for PS2, Flash for Pocket PC, you have a Flash player for Linux, but Macromedia hasn't really released a lot of products for the Linux environment at all.
JA: Linux is not heavily used as a desktop today, as you know. It's a tiny, tiny percentage of internet browsers and desktop users are using it for that. It's mostly developers, developer work stations that are using Linux. It's a small percentage. I don't think we built the Flash player for Linux because we thought that it was gonna be a huge part of the PC users out there, but more because embedded Linux is getting a lot of traction, there are a lot of device manufacturers who have built their platforms on Linux, many really big companies like AOL, Gateway, Intel, and many others are building their platforms on Linux, and so if we want to be in the embedded platforms, Flash needs to be on Linux. And in general we want to have the Flash platform be as portable as possible, so that it's the same runtime no matter where that content is living. All of our server products run on Linux, because there is a portion of the market that buys commercial that wants to run on Linux, because they find it to be a manageable, robust, reliable server platform and that's great. It's a substitute for Windows mostly, not really a substitute for Solaris. Mostly it's people that want a commodity level system, so we've been on Linux for quite some time and actually last year Linux was the fastest growing operating system in our server business.

FM: How do you feel about the open source products that are coming out and actually competing with the Macromedia products?
JA: I don't know that I would classify them as competitors, competition exists if the customers are evaluating two things and are making a choice between them, so a lot of the times what we find is that there are customers that are in the commercial market who are evaluating commercial products, and then there are people that have chosen to use open source for other reasons. That's a different person, often. When we go and do a completive situation out with a customer it's pretty rare that it's "we are either going to use PHP or ColdFusion", it's usually they are going to use ColdFusion, ASP or a Java server. And if a customer has elected to do open source, they have already made that election. So in some ways they are not real competitors, even though they are technically at some level there is an overlap on what they are trying to do, so I don't view them as big competitors.

Competition is real if it's actually having an impact in the market. So for example, you could say Computer Associates, which has database software, competes with Oracle, but no one else in the world would say that because they are just not really actively competing in the market. So if a technology exists as an open source technology that doesn't mean it actually competes.

FM: Well when it comes to PHP and ColdFusion, that is a pretty tough competitor, isn't it?
JA: PHP has a good amount of growth; I think it's about 8 percent of dynamic sites now, that's good. And that's growing. It went from 0 to 8 percent in about 2 years, ColdFusion is about 20% and ASP is about 45%. Perl is still a lot. A lot of that is legacy. So, yes, it's a growing phenomenon.

But we are in the commercial software business, that means that we are going to continue to build software that is sold for a price, and we think that it takes a huge amount of effort to build something of incredible quality and ease of use that people can take advantage of, and that customers will continue to want to pay for software. There is another piece to it though, which is that there are areas where consistently open source has commoditized certain parts of the stack of software. So in certain areas we say, what part of what we are building is ultimately going to be a commodity.

Either in the sense of commercial commodity like there are only two suppliers and they all sell it cheap, or an open source commodity in that there is a substitute and you can just use it. So we're starting to use open source technology in our commercial products because we have made a decision that thing is not something we want to have to build and there is a large community building it, and we are just going to use that. And I think that is fine.

FM: What kind of things are those, could you go into detail?
JA: For example, a lot of the XML infrastructure in ColdFusion and JRun is open source, based on open source XML parsers and transformation tools and other things, and that's great because there are a lot of people that need that, it's a clear community oriented technology, so that makes a lot of sense.

FM: You talked about looking at Flash before the merger, do you play with Flash yourself?
JA: Yes, I do. It's pretty cool.

FM: What kind of things do you do?
JA: I am not really building anything. I am playing, strictly. So I just like to tinker with the features and play with sample code, and just that kind of stuff. I wish I could say I was building deployed content or applications, but I don't have the time to do it.

FM: What kind of things do you personally think are fun about Flash?
JA: I come from a background of traditional application development, desktop stuff, and then the Web with HTML. So the thing that I find most interesting about it is just the whole metaphor for content and applications is totally different. There are aspects of it that are totally similar, but also aspects that are totally different. Using frames, scenes, and symbols to build applications is a different experience, and so I am constantly amazed by how those constructs are re-purposed for different uses and things that just weren't easily possible with past application development models or programming models. That's I think is the most interesting part of it for me.

FM: That part of Flash has taken object oriented programming to a new level.
JA: Yeah, that's really a different kind of use. What's amazing is when you compare what people can do with that and how quickly they can build really interesting user interfaces and behaviors compared to trying to do that using the Windows API and C to do that, it's just like night and day. It's totally different. That's one of the most beautiful things about it. It's the speed which people can create user interface constructs that are way beyond what you have been able to do using low level graphics and GUI APIs within an operating system.

FM: How do you view the web and the way Macromedia is going to be involved in it for the next five years? I am trying to get feel for what your visions are for the Web.
JA: Both Macromedia and Allaire have been innovators in the web for a long time, so we want to continue to have that position. So if that means new types of technology that improves what the Web can be, we will come up with those. We think there is a real opportunity to create an end-to-end system, so we have been out now lately talking about the Macromedia platform as this sort of covering all the products involved in the life cycle of the web.

The four D's:
Design, and technology for the design of graphic elements and layout and user experience.
Development, which is all the technologies needed for programming and coding and doing server side work and Delivery Platforms, the actually web content serving, dynamic application serving, the actual runtime for server side stuff. And then the
Display platform, the actual technology on the client that actually lets you have your application interface execute and run and work.

We've got products and technologies across all these four areas and we think that we are going to be there for the next five years. And we will deepen each of those where it is appropriate and make connections between them. And we think that there are definitely some broader trends that we think are going to be important like the trend around Web Services, and network software that is going to be an important trend; the trend around multiple devices and the challenge that presents across all those technologies; and the trend towards richer client experiences, which Macromedia Flash is at the center of right now is going to be an increasingly important trend over the next couple of years.

FM: Is documentation and making available documentation for products going to be something that will have higher priority?
JA: I don't know where we will end up on that, but Allaire makes all of it's product documentation available in HTML and PDF on the Web site. I don't know if that is going to translate to also doing that for the other Macromedia products, but that is something that we have done historically and which people really like, they want to be able to have that. The other thing that we did that I think was pretty cool, with Allaire, specifically Spectra and JRun, and we are going to be doing it for ColdFusion as well, is the idea of Live Docs. It's actually an idea we got from the PHP community. They don't have a product; they just have Live Docs, which is the actual documentation on the product. Has annotations and comment from the community. So if there is an example or a reference or a chapter, people can annotate it and can comment on it directly inside the Web site, so each page of the HTML documentation is actually a little interactive application.

And that is a neat way of getting the community involved in that. I am hoping that we do that for the other Macromedia products.

FM: There has been a discussion about Flash and usability as well as accessibility. There is even a law now in the United States now concerning accessibility, and that is a challenge in Flash right now. Is that something that you are looking at doing something about in Flash 6?
JA: We are all over that area of focus across the whole company actually. In fact, I was in a meeting yesterday covering where we are at on all of our different products, and what is some of the work we are going to do, and communicating these efforts with the customers. It's a very big focus for us; we think we can be a really active leader in these areas. There is actually a really good opportunity for us to do that even with Flash, because we control the Flash Player and we can do a lot of things to improve that so it's definitely a big focus. There are workarounds to accessibility today with Flash, when you are using the specific example of the visually impaired, like the blind, there are ways that you can interact with the host browser and output content into it, that can then be used and viewed inside a screen reader or something like that.

Actually the Macromedia Flash community manager, Mike Chambers, he has done some really interesting prototyping of actually doing that and incorporating that into the workflow of the Flash content that you design. So there are ways of doing that today that take advantage of facilities that exists that interact with HTML documents that you can output text streams to and things like that. There is a lot of work to do there, both with Flash and other products too. But it's a big, big focus for us. Government and corporations that serve government, and consultancy agencies that work with government, and just in general the public, which is Section 508 is designed to address is really important. it's like ramps on sidewalks, you had to do it, because it was about making the world accessible to people. That is exactly what is happening on the Web today.

FM: I have seen Eric Wittman talk about Flash 6, and that is something that everybody is really interested in knowing something about right now. It's been a little over a year since Flash 5 was released and if we go back, Flash 4 was released like about a year before that. So everybody is looking at the cycle and thinking that Flash 6 must be right around the corner. Eric is talking about the release of Flash 6 as a moving target for you. How do you look at the market right now and when people can expect to see Flash 6?
JA: We don't ever talk about product release dates and things like that until it's right within a quarter that we are going to be shipping something. We definitely want to make sure that the Macromedia Flash 5 gets really wide adoption, and it's getting wide adoption now. It does not help the authoring business if the player is not broadly distributed. That's part of it I think. The product release cycle does vary, now that Flash is a much more mature, relatively speaking, it's a much more mature platform. You don't want to change it quite as fast as you would in earlier stages. That is sort of the same thing that has happened with our server products. Now that we've got hundreds of thousands of apps deployed, running sites, running corporations, the appetite for new APIs, features, capabilities is less, so that has an influence on the cycles.

I think also with the economy, it's not a great time to launch new products when people aren't buying them. So you want to make sure that you release technology in a time that buyers are really going to be out there, and willing to spend the money to upgrade. There are a lot of factors, but we are working on new releases and new technologies across the board, and doing a lot of exciting stuff. The only broad comment I can make is that we know about some of the limitations of Flash today, we have heard loud and clear what we think some of those are on the authoring side, of the Player capabilities, we see a unique opportunity with using application servers as back-ends for Flash and building richer applications with Flash, and we want to improve the platform to be able do that in a much better way.