Madobedia: The Future of Design
I'm not a fan of corporate mergers and the gradual consolidation of companies that seems to be happening across most industries, so news of Adobe purchasing Macromedia left a bad initial taste in my mouth. After a bit of reflection and reading a few early impressions (one, two, three) around the Web, I can say that I'm a little assuaged but still have quite a few doubts. Things will definitely change with the products each company offers, but I wonder whether users will welcome all of the changes.
The Good
This merger can only strengthen the position of Flash and SVG graphics for the Web. Adobe's SVG support has been growing by leaps and bounds in the last few releases of their products; with an influx of Flash developers and the industry clout of Adobe, I hope that we'll see SVG support grow not only in Adobe/Macromedia products but in browsers and other software as well.
Tighter product integration between the two companies' respective suites will almost certainly be an outcome. How easy can they make it to export Photoshop comps into Dreamweaver? Sure, most web developers will still prefer to have their hands on the code, but just think of the rapid prototyping possibilities. If you can create a workable prototype in half the time, you might not have to show up to client meetings with Photoshop comps and explain, "This is where you'd click to do X."
I think we could see better print-to-web conversion as well. Macromedia is almost universally recognized as the industry leader in web design technology, and Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator software is the de facto standard in the print world. Even InDesign (though still a relative newcomer) is making huge leaps in acceptance with printers. Converting print documents for the web has been an issue for a long time; personally, I still prefer copying and pasting text from one program to another. If this merger can make that workflow easier, that alone will satisfy many people.
The Bad
No marriage is without its flaws. (Not that I can speak from experience.) What will happen to a number of competitive products after this merger has completed? I think it's safe to say that Photoshop, Flash, and Acrobat will exist more or less unchanged. What about Dreamweaver and GoLive? Will they be merged? Will one be dropped in favor of the other. Logically, it makes more sense to maintain Dreamweaver as it has a much larger market share, but it is Adobe buying Macromedia. ImageReady and Fireworks? This is tougher for me to call - a lot more people seem satisfied with Fireworks, but I'm not very familiar with it. I also hardly ever use ImageReady - particularly not the newer versions. (It always seemed like a mostly redundant copy of Photoshop to me.) And what about that bastard child of Macromedia, Director? Will it finally breath its last as Flash continues its inexorable climb to the top? (I have nothing against Director - my experiences with both, several years ago, left me favoring Director for multimedia production. Flash, I'm told, has come a long way since then, while Director seems to have stagnated a bit.)
The Ugly
Macromedia and Adobe are direct competitors and are two of the strongest names in the design field. As a single company with little in the way of major competition, can we dare to hope that they'll still strive to create amazing products that focus on the designers and developers that use them? Or need we fear that the Creative Suite will become the Microsoft Office of the creative world? Does this open the field at all to major competition from Apple? (With the iLife and iWork suites, is there an iCreate suite down the road?) What about Corel? (Hahahaha. No, seriously.)
The only thing for us peons to do right now, however, is sit and watch. We can cross our fingers and hope for the best, but somehow things will change.
About this Entry
This entry was posted on
Monday, April 18, 2005 at 11:15 AM under the categories:
Software, Technology.
Comments
1. On Monday, Apr 18 at 10:17 PM, Jason said:
We had a long chat about all this at work today, and it seems like this whole thing boils down to Flash. There was a quote from an exec at Adobe on cnet about the new corporate structure, and the way it was worded seems to indicate a lot of people at Macromedia may be looking for jobs soon.
Your logo treatment is also the best I've seen so far. Top notch, my good man!
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