There Goes the Neighbourhood - Adobe Acquires Macromedia
Published by on April 19th, 2005
Adobe Acquires Macromedia - The software maker shells out $3.4 billion for the multimedia company as corporate consolidation continues apace in Silicon Valley.
That’s really not good news. Adobe’s attitudes have been steadily heading towards the Quark school of market attitudes with the enforcing, or should we say ‘aggressive encouragement’, of the market to bundled applications rather than pick and mix.
Adobe have announced that the will be no product killoffs, but how can a single corporation handle directly competing products? Will Freehand and Illustrator remain in the market space? Unlikely. Clear product definition is vital to success and the user base will merely become confused. Even if the Macromedia brand is retained, the consolidation of the opposing products will inevitably lead to Adobe-isation and the downward spiral to product confusion.
However much I love Photoshop and Illustrator, I really wish now there were usable alternatives.
Adobe’s new product structure - Creative Suite - is less a bargain basement for Adobe software and more a manipulation of the market and a middle finger to long term users.
I have Photoshop, Illustrator and In Design and have upgraded them pretty much every year. Now, in order to make it economically viable for future upgrades I must move across to the creative suite. My upgrade options consist of upgradnig just one of those applications with the past investment in the others ignored and discarded.
Once I have moved to CS - which also gives me a host of useless functionality (to me, personally at least) I am then tied to having no choice but to upgrade the entire suite at each iteration. The option to assess each application’s new functions and choose to upgrade or skip a version has been removed. If I want to upgrade just Photoshop, I have to upgrade the whole lot - at a greatly increased price.
I’m a fan of Adobe products, I’m no longer a fan of Adobe.
One Response to “There Goes the Neighbourhood - Adobe Acquires Macromedia”
April 20th, 2005 at 7:58 pm
And I just recently bought Macromedia Suite MX 2004…oh well.