Adobe acquires Macromedia
Comments: 19
This is straight off Metafilter but the holy crap! aspect of it makes it worth repeating: Adobe acquires Macromedia.
Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe’s and Macromedia’s closing prices on Friday April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock.
The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better. Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools – and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash – we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems.
Heavens above.
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Posted to Oh, the Humanity • 2005.04.18 (Mon) • 19:27
Comments
Posted by Kristen 2005.04.18, 20:38
I’m surprised this didn’t happen long ago considering the ongoing movement towards mega-mergers and monopolies and all.
Posted by Gerald Buckley 2005.04.18, 23:31
They should have done everyone a bigger favor and bought Quark instead… Ruin IT first THEN buy Macromedia and ruin that…
Posted by David Kaspar 2005.04.19, 00:37
I bet Adobe wanted some of the Flash action.
Weren’t Adobe GoLive and Macromedia Dreamweaver two competing products? What happens to competing product when companies merge?
Posted by Donnie 2005.04.19, 01:45
“What happens to competing product when companies merge?”
When Macromedia merged with Allaire, they slowly phased Homesite into Dreamweaver, and I thought they actually did a good job. IMHO, Dreamweaver is far superior to GoLive, and I hope Adobe bags that project all together in favor of Dreamweaver. I am a bit nervous, however, they will try to Adobefy Dreamweaver.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens (Texas) 2005.04.19, 04:14
When Adobe bought Frame they discontinued FrameMaker for the Mac (that is, for Mac OSX). Strange move since FM was created for a UNIX environment and had all those nifty emacs shortcuts that made it great for developers and technical writers alike in a UNIX shop. It was a great product for its niche, large book projects.
When I get my new Mac I’ll have to abandon FrameMaker entirely since I won’t have System 9 anymore. What a pain to convert all those files to text and html and to lose all my lovely formatting. And I’ll miss the ease of creating and managing footnotes. And indexing. And those beautiful, easy tables. I’m just glad I don’t need it professionally anymore.
Posted by Steve Truett 2005.04.19, 08:52
I can’t see this as being a good move for the average web designer. GoLive is an inferior product to Dreamweaver, and removing this piece of competition from the market will only stifle innovation. The best we can hope for is that Adobe keeps its muddy little paws out of Flash & Dreamweaver and let the products continue to shine on their own merits. Sadly, that will probably not be the case, and I predict a bastardized version of Dreamweaver (with a GoLive Label stamped on top) in the near future.
Posted by Ryan 2005.04.19, 08:56
No offense but both of them produce aweful HTML.
:)
Posted by Durf 2005.04.19, 11:23
I like GoLive. :(
Which basically means that no matter what happens, someone posting here is going to be disappointed by the lack of development of one of those apps, and all of us (in the long run) will be unhappy with the lack of competition pushing both of them forward. Think “MS Word over the last ten years.”
Posted by Ryan 2005.04.19, 13:17
I think this will happen:
Illustrator will stay, Freehand will go
Photoshop will stay
Imageready will be killed like the red headed step child that it is and replaced by an Adobeised Fireworks
Dreamweaver will get Adobeised and replace GoLive
Flash will stay and whatever Adobe’s lame attempt at a competitor is will die, if it hasn’t already
Coldfusion… stay?
What else is left?
Posted by 11by14 2005.04.20, 00:46
Will Macromedia exist as a sub-brand under Adobe or will it be cast off?
Posted by Marko 2005.04.20, 08:23
Adobified? Well, Adobe did invent the current UI paradigm and it is a great one. Everybody else tried to copy it, including Macromedia.
Both GoLive and Dreamweaver produce horrible code, as someone has already noted. And lots of it. No offense, but neither of them can hold a candle to BBEdit in that respect. Or HomeSite for that matter.
I hope Adobe combines the best of both into one. Ditto for Fireworks and ImageReady. FireReady or ImageWorks - doesn’t really matter what they call it as long as they combine the best from both and discard the worst.
Smart money is that Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash will stay.
Posted by cd21 2005.04.20, 14:59
This is, I’d guess, bad news for open standards. Adobe has been one of the most visible backers of SVG. Though SVG has been slow to gain mainstream acceptance, it is really the only conceivable standardized alternative to Flash. Now Adobe has incentive to actively work against SVG, so good luck to those of use who’d like to have any control over the formats we use to publish.
Posted by Donnie 2005.04.20, 15:06
Code snobs aside, Dreamweaver is actually a very decent—dare I say good?—IDE for HTML, PHP, Coldfusion, ASP, etc… especially in the MX 2004 version. Code completion/hints for all of the afore noted and CSS all natively which is more than I can say for BBEdit. Naturally, I refused to get in a debate between the two products because they are so inherently different. I just wanted to make the point that Dreamweaver works great in the coding view, it is more than just a WYSIWYG as some have alluded to.
Posted by Marko 2005.04.21, 02:02
No debate needed. It’s only the tools we’re talking about here, and the best tool is always the one that you feel most comfortable with.
Hopefully, Adobe will make the best out of all these applications and we will all end up with a better toolset.
Posted by Ryan 2005.04.22, 12:32
If you’re using Dreamweaver as an IDE to write your code then apart from “user friendliness” it’s no different to Notepad. Much like the vi versus Visual Studio style debates.
I was obviously alluding to it’s use to generate HTML code. Which makes me cry every time.
:)
Posted by ryan 2005.04.28, 14:09
Gee don’t you love these parasites.
Posted by theoria 2005.04.29, 00:42
Yikes. This is bad news, methinks. I remember when Macromedia bought Allaire I was quite excited because Drumbeat was a product with potential and a shitty interface. Macromedia would make up for Allaire’s shortcomings nicely. Adobe and Macromedia are a different matter altogether. Here are two companies that don’t compliment each other at all. One or the other’s software is going to suffer, potentially. I could see Adobe totally screwing up Dreamweaver and maybe even Flash. That’s my biggest fear.
Posted by david 2005.04.30, 06:55
If memory serves true, Drumbeat was an Elemental Software product. Both Elemental and Allaire got aquired by Macromedia and pioneering Drumbeat (a great but unstable product) got dumped while the users got a not-so-special deal on Dreamweaver. Frankly, I don’t see Adobe doing much to keep the Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Freehand lot going for much longer. :(
Posted by Bruce 2006.04.15, 22:44
Adobe decided to kill Macromedia branch. This is really bad. Adobe will not manage some web things as good as Macromedia.
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