Recently, those that follow the Internet technologies/graphics and multimedia industry were greeted with some rather interesting news: Adobe and Macromedia have agreed to a deal which allows Adobe to purchase Macromedia for an estimated 3.4 billion dollars (USD).
Mike Chambers, a product manager at Macromedia, shared some details about upcoming Macromedia products, as well as day-to-day operations, which he says will continue on as before: We are still working on 8ball, Maelstrom and everything else we have been working on. We are still planning to ship sometime in the second half of this year. We are still committed to Flash as a development platform (probably more than ever now). We are still committed to our server products, such as ColdFusion (7 has been incredibly successful) and Flex. Adobe, on the other hand, provides the expected forward thinking/corporate speak responses in an What is the mission of the combined company? Adobe's mission remains the same - to help people and businesses communicate better. With the acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe strengthens its mission through the combination of leading-edge development, authoring and collaboration tools - and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash. Going forward, the combined company has the opportunity to define a robust technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content across a wide range of devices and operating systems. While this statement is quite flowery, it does contain information that can help draw conclusions about the reasons why. Adobe seems to be focusing on Flash, while Chambers, who mentions something about Flash in his blog, supports this: I strongly believe in the potential of Flash as a cross-platform solution for deploying rich content and applications (I can't stress the cross-platform part of that enough). Together, the combined company will have the resources on our own to make the platform successful on a larger scale. He goes on to say that Adobe's increased revenue and presence will give Flash a stronger support system than the one provided by Macromedia. Chambers also mentions the fact that Adobe has more resources to support Flash. He believes Adobe's support will allow Flash to "play a significant role as the next generation application / content platform." Although both companies are hesitant to reveal upcoming changes, one thing that continues to be mentioned is how this deal will benefit Flash, which leads to another question: Did Adobe pay $3.4 billion for a Flash plug-in? Another area of interest concerns the various reactions found in web developer and other Internet technology-related forums. This is where talk of an Adobe monopoly was the loudest. Many posters see the deal as Adobe consuming their competition, while hurting overall developer software innovation. On the Murdok. Visit Murdok for theSuggest a Correction
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