Late last month, news of Adobe’s corporate acquisition of Macromedia was the choice topic for people on many message boards. To some, the purchase seemed predictable. The companies had been butting heads for several years as they grew further and further into each other’s market segments, unable to really gain significant ground on the other.
Macromedia and Adobe Planning to Tie the Knot - When Adobe is King (Page 4 of 4 )
If the merging of programs is successful, Adobe users are afraid that Adobe will maintain a dominant market share and it could relax. The products could merge and then serious development could stop. The comparison some people are making is to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6, which hasn’t had an update (besides bug fixes) since it killed its rival Netscape in 2001. Microsoft even responded to these concerns in the internet explorer blog (http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2005/02/22/378470.aspx). It’s not reasonable that all Adobe products will stagnate like this, but maybe some may lack the attention others get. If even one of their products slows in development, it would only open the door for competitors, and their dominance with that product would be short lived. As an example, remember what Firefox is rapidly doing to Internet Explorer’s market share while IE has been stagnating (http://news.com.com/ Growth+rate+slips+for+Firefox+usage/2100-1032_3-5592677.html). This new competition apparently woke Microsoft up recently, when they announced plans to release IE7 this summer.
All doubts aside, it seems unanimous that the move is going to be great for Adobe. Adobe will be the de facto ruler of web design, having Dreamweaver and Flash as products rather than competitors. The value of Macromedia to Adobe is likely amplified by the plans that Elop has had to put Flash on cell phones. Flash is installed on approximately 98% of computers on the internet, and it is widely implemented in ads, movies, interactive presentations, and time-wasting games. Reaching the mobile market would expand the presence of this ubiquitous program even further. Instead of just making money off of selling Flash development software to programmers, they’d also be raking it in from every phone that is set up with Flash software. Macromedia already has Flash on two phone carries in Japan, and has made agreements with phone manufacturers Nokia and Samsung. They predict having a Flash phone by the end of the year but still could use a deal with a cell carrier.
It’s hard to tell what hand Adobe may have in this new direction for Flash, if they will meddle with the direction Elop was already going with Flash. Judging from the statement released that they are trying to reach a “wide range of devices and operating systems,” they’ll definitely be capitalizing on the mobile market. Maybe they’ll even bring the successor of Macromedia’s products to operating systems where they were lacking, such as Linux. Regardless, it’s going to be interesting to see how the companies' technologies merge.
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Will Macromedia Soon Become Micromedia?
