The Death of Macromedia...The Birth of a Monster

On April 18, 2005, Adobe announced that it was buying Macromedia, thus marking the beginning of a merger between the two dominant players in web graphics technologies. For decades now, Adobe has been a goliath in professional graphics for print and to some extent for the web. However, since Macromedia's reorganization around web technologies in the late 90's, many, I daresay most, professional web developers have come to rely on Macromedia's innovations in web content creation. Macromedia's Dreamweaver was the first professional-grade WYSIWYG HTML editor to create clean code. Fireworks still leads the industry in the creation of animated GIF's, better GIF and JPEG optimization algorithms, and a slew of productivity innovations such as "image slicing"...features which Adobe has been trying to duplicate without much success until recently, by shoehorning all the additional features into the Photoshop add-on program know as ImageReady. And Macromedia's Flash Player, had already become the most widely distributed piece of software in history before Adobe even started thinking about vector graphics for the web. So by the time they released Adobe LiveMotion to compete with Flash, there was a loyal and vast following for Flash. SVG, the XML-based file format proposed as the output format for LiveMotion, seemed like a pathetic and poorly disguised attempt to sneak their own SVG format into international web standards when I watched Adobe's presentation at FlashForward 2000. John Warnock was lucky not to have been booed off the stage during his presentation. I interviewed some of the people Adobe had hired to build demo projects for the Adobe presentation, and they admitted to having used Flash to build the LiveMotion presentations. I lost alot of respect for Adobe that day. Adobe still continues to develop LiveMotion, but they have consistently failed to get content creators to use the SVG format. Why? Because everyone is quite happy with Flash. So, Adobe is now buying Macromedia and effectively destroying their only competition. For all of us content creators, this is a very bad sign. Combined with the coming browser war between Firefox and Explorer, this could literally plunge us right back into the dark ages of web design. Of course, Peak Oil is going to do that anyway, so I guess it doesn't really matter anyway. None of us are going to have jobs in 10 years when nobody can afford the electricity to power their computers. Too bad.