![[decorative element]](http://designorati.com/wp-content/themes/d3/images/nav1_topics_OFF.png){kind=small}
Macromedia Is Now Adobe
Goodbye Macromedia.
Goodbye Macromedia.
Last week Adobe completed their acquisition of Macromedia. Not surprisingly, it appears Adobe is retiring the Macromedia brand, as Macromedia’s site now has an Adobe masthead reading “formerly Macromedia.” though products acquired from Macromedia will still include the Macromedia name. Macromedia’s stock (MACR) has ceased trading and was officially converted to Adobe (ADBE) on December 5th, with Adobe announcing plans to lay off an unspecified number of employees. Macromedia (MACR) closed at $48.26 last week, while Adobe (ADBE) climbed to $34.97.
Adobe explains the acquisition will help the company penetrate the mobile, web, and enterprise markets. With Adobe finally taking advantage of the market for mobile content, their Mobile and Device Solutions Business Unit will focus on Flash Lite and FlashCast. The most recent release of Flash came with almost 90 mobile device profiles, with Macromedia pledging to update with every new device supporting Flash Lite. Macromedia Studio, Dreamweaver, and Flash join the Creative Solutions Business Unit and Flex will continue to be marketed as an enterprise and developer solution alongside Adobe LiveCycle. Breeze will be sold under their Knowledge Worker Solutions Business Unit, but Contribute and Captivate will be marketed as part of the Print and Classic Publishing Solutions Business Unit.
The future looks grim for unmentioned products in Adobe’s business units, despite no official mention of being discontinued. Director’s been on borrowed time ever since the belated MX version, and conjointly dropping Freehand comes as no surprise after being exiled from the Studio 8 suite. Sadly, Fireworks doesn’t seem able to hold weight against industry favorite Illustrator, despite its growth in recent years as a solid web graphics application. FlashPaper also seems to have been abandoned, with Adobe planning to combine Adobe Reader and Flash Player. Adobe has no mention of possible discontinued products, though one has to wonder what the future has in store for GoLive, which despite smooth integration with InDesign, never quite caught on.
The company announced three new product bundles: the Adobe Design Bundle (currently available) including Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Flash Professional 8; the Adobe Web Bundle (currently available) including Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium with Studio 8; and the Adobe Video Bundle (expected early 2006 release) with Adobe video Solutions and Flash Professional 8. Both the currently available bundles offer savings from purchasing the Macromedia and Adobe products separately.
Adobe’s biggest obstacle may come from Microsoft’s yet to be released cross-platform Expression suite, which includes Sparkle Interactive, Quartz Web Designer, and the design application in Community Technology Preview, code-named Acrylic. Whether or not the Microsoft products will have competitive leverage is yet to be seen, as they integrate with Visual Studio for development of XAML and .NET based applications for Windows.
- Macromedia.com Is Deactivated, Rolled Into Adobe.com
- It’s A Go!
- First Impressions: Dreamweaver and Flash CS4
- What The Adobe-Macromedia Merger Means For Photoshop
- GoLive vs Dreamweaver
- Chris Perkins Of Media Lab Discusses The Merger
- FreeHand Now Out Of Development
- 24 Hours of CS3: My First Thoughts After Using The Suite
- Adobe Fireworks Now Bundled With CS3 Design Premium
- Adobe/Macromedia Merger: What It Means for Print Designers
The strange thing is that they’re including both Dreamweaver AND GoLive in the new web bundle. I wonder what the future holds…GoWeaver? DreamLive?
I hadn’t really paid much attention to the merger since the news broke earlier this year, but this is exciting. I cant wait for the final product lineup and more in-depth news. It should be interesting to see how Reader and Flash Player may blend together.
I need to get my hands on the Adobe Design Bundle, that’s for sure. I’ve also been watching Microsoft’s new product, and it seems
oops, comment got cut off. I was saying it seems like it could give Adobe a run for its money. I know the demo video was very impressive.
I guess I wasn’t that surprised to see them still selling GoLive and Dreamweaver, since there were a lot of updates to the most recent version of GoLive. If I were a betting kind of gal, I’d put my money on GoLive somehow being incorporated into InDesign as a sort of middleman to move documents from Print to Web and vice versa.
I’d also bet Microsoft’s Expression Suite won’t have a huge effect on Adobe, because I think Expression will target people developing mainly for .NET and enterprise. I know one of the features is the ability to create client-side rendered graphics. Although, this could give Flex a run for its money, since it’s Flash based and also renders on the client-side.
While this seems like it will work out to be a good thing for Dreamweaver, I am a little scared about the loss of Fireworks. It is such a nice lightweight, easy to use program, and while it is true that it doesn’t stack up to Illustrator, it isn’t nearly the resource hog that Illustrator is and allows me to get things done quickly.
Hope they don’t drop it!
Kai, you said it. Fireworks is my favorite, and it’s much easier for me to have just that open rather than several other applications. Macromedia put a lot of work into the Fireworks 8 release. Additionally, one can create custom panels for Fireworks in Flash, and you just don’t get that level of customization from any of the Adobe products.
[...] Macromedia Is Now Adobe (Designorati) Beth Dean laments the loss of FireWorks and speculates on the merger’s resulting product line. … [...]
Its a shame to see a company that ‘ahs’ grown with me as i have learnt to build sites - i bought there last suite as a precuation as i have never been a fan of Adobe Golive - and i agree with sentiment of losing Fireworks and excellent package to do graphice _ PS CSS is way to chuncking and expensive if you are in the thrid world !
But what of Director? It wouldn’t be a great loss to me (especially now with the Bitmap facilities of Flash 8) but I know a few people who are genuinely worried about whether Director has a future - does anyone know?
Director? Well, Adobe is planning a Video bundle, but they haven’t finalized it yet. I think we shall wait until then. Have a look here: http://www.adobe.com...ts/bundles/main.html
And you might want to have a look at the Motion Design Center: http://www.adobe.com...tiondesign/main.html
They seem to emphasize After Effects and its comboned used with Flash.
I hope Director has a future. Lingo is a much stronger language than ActionScript is, but ActionScript is growing. Now that Flash handles video and sound well, Director is becoming more and more obsolete, which I think has to do with poor marketing.
Director was never intended to do the things Flash does, Director was mainly for things like kiosk displays, digital brochures, and enhanced cds. It never compressed well for the web, and it wasn’t really supposed to. I think Flash still has a way to go if it’s going to replace Director in these areas.
Cheers for the replies! I’m sure that’ll help allay my colleagues fears (although I could argue about the strength of Actionscript over Lingo - but I’ll save that for the pub!)
[...] Macromedia Is Now Adobe (Designorati) Beth Dean laments the loss of FireWorks and speculates on the merger’s resulting product line. … [...]