Adobe Acquires Macromedia

I just read that Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia has been cleared by the Fed and will be finalized tomorrow [a Saturday?].

I think that this is horribly bad news.

Nothing against Adobe - I love them and use their products over Macromedia's. I use/used Photoshop/Image Ready, Premiere, After Effects, Illustrator, GoLive, Acrobat Pro, Adobe Type Manager and even tinkered a bit with InDesign. I never got my head around programming in/with Flash and have never used Dreamweaver, Freehand or any of Macromedia's other products.

But to consolidate the two companies, things are going to change and I think for the worse. They will be the top dog in just about every field [except video where Apple's Final Cut Pro still reigns] and I'm not a big fan of that. I think it will lead to slower growth [after the first year or so where there will be lots of brainstorming and sharing of trade secrets] and general ass-dragging.

There will probably be some integration of features, but in which direction? Will Adobe just kill off most of Macromedia's software? I sure as fuck hope not. Will prices come down a notch? I hope not too many programmers will be cut as a result but I know some will, that is inevitable.

Comments

[Scott]

Dreamweaver is so much better than GoLive.

Seriously.

Most folks in the Macromedia/Adobe community think Adobe was interested in one thing only: Flash (and Flex, Macromedia Rich Internet Applications framework, which is Flash driven). All the rest was gravy (including my favorite Macromedia product, ColdFusion).

[qwetzed]

i agree this is a real shame of a deal for consumer, there will be no competition in this field for at least 5 years after this merger.

I agree with Scott above, you should give dreamweaver a chance, I have found the interface to be much more intuitive and the code it creates to be much more lean.

I disagree about ColdFusion tho Scott... Learn PHP if you want to do any of that stuff... :-)

[albert]

the gauntlet has been thrown! maybe i will give dreamweaver a chance soon.

i did a teensy bit of php in college, one course. i'm no good at that stuff.

[Scott]

PHP? Are you mad sir? The nice thing about Coldfusion is that it takes care of soooo much for you. Wanna run a query? CFQUERY is right there. No need to open a DB connection, execute, close it... make sure it is closed. CF just does it.

But I don't want to hijack Albert's comments. :)

[albert]

Scott you damn Sudanese comment pirate!