acidlabs

WTF!? The entire Macromedia-centric blogmos is going nuts about the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. Just check the Goog

This isn’t one I would ever have picked… and I’m not certain it’s a good thing. There are too many concurrent spaces in tools offered by Adobe and Macromedia for this to be truly good. I think it will actually ultimately stifle competition and innovation.

Here are the problems I see (note these are pure speculation):

• Photoshop and Illustrator lose their only serious competition - goodbye Fireworks and Freehand;
• the dilution of the Macromedia web development toolset in favor of the Adobe tools - Dreamweaver gets eaten by GoLive;
• another loss of focus for ColdFusion in a market space desperately in need of a strong presence - I just don’t see it being a priority for Adobe;
• Flex going the way of Spectra (down the toilet). It’s overpriced and under-marketed and I don’t see it being a big player for Adobe;
• Whither Flash? Will it be absorbed into the Acrobat toolset. That’d be my guess.

I’ll be delighted if I’m proved wrong, and frankly, I hope I am. It’ll be interesting to see whether the whole thing gets past the US regulatory authorities and the stockholders…