Chris Perkins Of Media Lab Discusses The Merger

Last month I spoke with Chris Perkins of Media Lab (SiteGrinder, PSD2FLA) about the Adobe-Macromedia merger.

The discussion that has followed my article “What The Adobe-Macromedia Merger Means For Photoshop” reminded me of an e-mail I received last December from Chris Perkins of Media Lab, Inc., which produces several productivity plug-ins including SiteGrinder (which converts Photoshop files to XHTML webpages) and PSD2FLA (which converts Photoshop files to Flash files). This was back when the merger was bigger news than it is now, and I wondered what his initial reaction was:

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Last month I spoke with Chris Perkins of Media Lab (SiteGrinder, PSD2FLA) about the Adobe-Macromedia merger.

The discussion that has followed my article “What The Adobe-Macromedia Merger Means For Photoshop” reminded me of an e-mail I received last December from Chris Perkins of Media Lab, Inc., which produces several productivity plug-ins including SiteGrinder (which converts Photoshop files to XHTML webpages) and PSD2FLA (which converts Photoshop files to Flash files). This was back when the merger was bigger news than it is now, and I wondered what his initial reaction was:

We always thought Adobe should have bought us instead of Macromedia. If it was interoperability that they were looking for we would have been a much cheaper purchase and have come with much less integration headaches. Of course, there are many other and better reasons to buy Macromedia ( like market share ).

Yes, I worry that the merger will affect our products, particularly PSD2FLA our Photoshop to Flash bridge. Now that the merger is complete I think that odds are high that the next version of either Flash or Photoshop will have a complete bridging between those two products.

The second comment is particularly prescient, as the Lightroom Beta already has the ability to convert a slide show into a Flash file (though I don’t know yet if it’s simply a Flash movie or a true .fla file, which is what PSD2FLA does).

Is this merger, or mergers like it, a problem for the industry? I don’t think this one will be a problem for the industry. Frankly, it hasn’t seemed to me that there is a lot of competition in this particular industry. So their merger won’t change that. When they join forces those two companies will become a behemoth, which means they’ll move even slower than they are now, but the industry itself will continue to change and evolve and the same rapid pace it always has. Thus, opportunities will open allowing some brave small nimble company to grab the brass ring,

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  1. [...] It’s rare that people quote me, but last week was a banner week for me. Here I am, quoted about the Adobe Macromedia merger, and if you look carefully here, you’ll find a short tidbit that was in the Oregonian on Tango. The Sunday article even had photos (of me). [...]

    — Trackback from Developing the World Favorite WYSIWYG HTML Tool and Photoshop Plug-in » Blog Archive » Chipping away at my fifteen minutes
    16 January 2006

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