Drop da Bomb - Adobe buys Macromedia
What sounds like a bad April 1st joke has really happened. Grafiksoftware maker Adobe buys grafiksoftwaremaker Macromedia as heise.de reports. Everyone working in the creative field will see that this is about the worst thing that can happen as it effectivly gives Adobe the monopoly over the whole creative industry. The only real competitor to them was Macromedia that put some good products on the block to give adobe a worthy competitor. On the other side Macromedia was the more hated company. They subsequently made bad business decisions. The could have elevated flash to be a much more integrated tool by opening it up completely and trying to make it a webstandard - instead they kept it as close as possible did not go away from the binäry format for flash. With dreamweaver promising "WYSIWYG" webpublishing it always failed to produce platform independent code (most sites look good on Internet Explorer but fail to load properly on any other browser out there) but it had a market dominance in that field and LOTS of websites are produced with dreamweaver (look the code of those websites and you see why its always a bad idea to use "WYSIWYG" editors.
Adobe of course is not much better. With Photoshop steering more and more in the direction of an overbloated unstable piece of software that is targeted more and more in the direction of the consumer market (who has no use for about 98% of the functions that are present in photoshop and the Pro market has no use of 90% of the new functions in Creative Suite 2). GoLive might produce some better code in html (still far from perfect) but the usability was about as good as writing the code by hand.
The real battle between Adobe and Macromedia was always in the Publishing market. Freehand or Illustrator is the question when you are going into the field - the two programs in its core have the same output: 2d vector graphics. The approach of both is fundamentally different. One feels more like an addon to photoshop with reduced functionality as much as possible (Illustrator) the other got very bloated with tons of functions over the course of time and can now even do animations(freehand). I for one always liked Freehand - I started out on it and really liked the early versions - recently I switched as the code bloat that went on in Freehand was unbearable for users that just wanted to make 2d vector art. And there is much more about the fundamentals of those two companies and their approach to software.
I think it was just a matter of time that Macromedia got bought up. The first signs of trouble came a couple of years ago when they got bought up by company that produced server database software - a company that never had any experience in the grafiksoftware market. And from that point on Macromedia was about flash - every single decission in Macromedias software updates was circling about flash integration - and that is what made things even worse. Flash is ok - don´t get me wrong. You can make some small vector animation with it - that is great - but touting Flash as THE content delivering platform on the net is a failing approach - especially when you make it closed source and don´t let the web at large have a say on the development. Putting video into flash is like putting a Truckmotor into a Smart (ah the car car comparison). It could do more if it could carry the load in first place. Putting a closed source video codec that is five years old into a binäry container is pure bullshit.
It seems that predictions that Macromedia is tumbling blindly through corporate space seemed right and the only thing that kept them afloat was that the flash plugin was installed with every webbrowser from NS 4.0 onward. That is what Adobe is interested in - either by killing flash completely or by making the flash plugin display SVG code. That would be a good thing about the byeout. What will be bad is that adobe has completely stifled all innovation on the part of the market that was in their hands (it took them 5 years to include stupid RAW support to photoshop, it took them about the same time to include high dynamic range image support - they still have not included floating point support for image manipulation and so on and so on) now they can just sit back and relax and not worry that another company will be able to make a product that rivals Adobe in about the next 5 years - that is about as long as would take any company to make a stable product that could rival the 15 years or longer development of the existing products. Just to secure their income for the rest of all our lives adobe gets all the patents from macromedia which makes development of any other graphic tool almost impossible if you are bound to IP property laws of the US and soon Europe.
All very very bad for the creative space. I just hope Apple can set a counter example with integrating most of the image manipulation code into the OS and then let very small developers (or the content creators themself) create specified application for specific tasks very easily. Its the only way out of a Microsoft like situation on the grafiksoftware market.