If you didn’t go near the Internet yesterday, you may not have heard that Adobe plans to acquire Macromedia. Unless stockholders or the antitrust arm of the government strongly object, the deal will go through this fall.
The possible impact on creative professionals is big — at least a 6.5 on the Richter scale. If you rely on Flash, Fireworks, FreeHand, Dreamweaver, Director, ColdFusion, or any other Macromedia product, you may be concerned that Adobe will change or even kill these applications. If you love Adobe’s GoLive or ImageReady, you may fear for their survival.
I’ve been called a Pollyanna, and I’m trying to live up to my reputation by envisioning the possible positive outcomes of this merger. With the brains of two companies working on it, we could at last see a truly WYSIWYG tool for creating solid CSS. Maybe typecentric Adobe will revive Macromedia’s Fontographer, which has languished for years in the software equivalent of a dark basement. Maybe ColdFusion will finally be available on the Mac side. Maybe the SWF and SVG formats will join hands and skip merrily through the world of animated vectors.
But maybe not.
I think competition is good for business. Competition spurs software companies to improve their products, to innovate. Squelch competition and you get a monopoly, which — while a fine board game — is often bad news for consumers.
My monopoly fears don’t stop with an Adobe/Macromedia merger. The combined companies (one blog poster suggested "Macrobe" as a new name) could be powerful enough to flatten other players. What will happen to Quark? If Quark fails, will Adobe be as strongly motivated to improve InDesign and other programs?
Perhaps a new competition would emerge, this time between Adobe/Macromedia and Microsoft. For the most part, Microsoft hasn’t served the needs of creative pros. This merger might force Bill Gates to cater to us, which would spur Adobe/Macromedia to continually improve, and Microsoft would respond, and….
I can’t quite believe in this scenario, either. Instead, creative pro customers could become third-class citizens as the two mega-companies battle it out for business and entertainment dollars.
To vent your own concerns, click on the word “Comments” above or below this article.
And now, this Pollyanna has got to prepare her earthquake kit.
This article was last modified on December 17, 2022
This article was first published on April 18, 2005
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