Squash… Dead… Disassemble…

Ames called me on Tuesday to ask if I had heard “the big news”. I think I surprised her when I said that I had heard of the Adobe/Macromedia merger the day before. Since I hadn’t ranted to her about it Monday night, she wanted to know what my opinon was. I’ve been kind of quiet about the whole thing because I half-heartedly agree with Greg Storey in that unless you’ve got a huge investment in Macromedia as a company, it’s not that big of a deal. On the other hand, Ames is right too. It is big news. In one $3.4 Billion swipe of a corporate credit card, one company owns most of the software that I use for work.

OK, so now I’m somewhat interested (not jamming my eyes back into their sockets interested – just interested). As long as I have the tools I need to do my job and they’re not going the jack the prices through the roof, I’m happy. The problem is that there is a lot of overlaps in the products of these two companies and it will be interesting to see which flagship products get the axe. Take Dreamweaver and GoLive for instance. Dreamweaver is the much more trendy/popular app, and I would only assume they would keep it. Aside from Flash, I think Dreamweaver was a key acquisition of this deal. Then there’s Freehand and Illustrator. These are both GREAT products, but if it’s Adobe’s call, I would think they’re going to snip Freehand right off the Studio MX package and banish it to never be upgraded causing it’s sales to dwindle till it dies a slow painful death in Adobe’s dark dungeon.

I guess that’s the thing that makes this merger so tragic to some people. It’s not a case like Google’s purchase of Blogger, where they are strategically putting themselves in a new market. These are two popular companies that have been expanding a thriving industry with their competition and now there is only one, and no competition to be found. I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see what the fallout will bring. In the mean time, be sure to check out John Gruber’s: Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Adobe’s “FAQ” Regarding Their Acquisition of Macromedia

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