Macromedia and Adobe

Adobe announced that it will buy Macromedia. They say it will “provide customers a more powerful set of solutions for creating, managing and delivering compelling content and experiences across multiple operating systems, devices and media.” Yes, it could. The press releases continues, “Together, the two companies will meet a wider set of customer needs and have a significantly greater opportunity to grow into new markets, particularly in the mobile and enterprise segments.”

On the one hand, this is pretty spiffy news. The four most used programs I have are: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Homesite+ (for ColdFusion and XHTML coding) and Macromedia Flash. So, that’s 50/50 there. Maybe it’s like that for a lot of people. If so, maybe there will be a package deal and/or more integration of the four products. Somehow. Supposedly there is already great integration of the Macromedia packages with some sort of almost drop and go ability, though I haven’t used it like that.

I remember when Allaire owned ColdFusion. Did it improve when Macromedia got it? I don’t know. With such a variety of products, will they support them all or combine/drop some? For example, would Fireworks and Illustrator merge? I hope not. I prefer Illustrator, however there are lots that prefer Fireworks.

If they’re all owned by the company, will this help prices or hurt them? The stuff’s pretty darn expensive as it is.

Adobe Creative Suite Premium 1.3 (Adobe Photoshop CS2, Illustrator CS2, InDesign CS2, GoLive CS2, and Acrobat 7.0 Professional software with new Version Cue CS2, Adobe Bridge, and Adobe Stock Photos) US$1,199.00

Macromedia Studio MX with Flash Professional (Dreamweaver MX 2004, Flash MX Professional 2004, Fireworks MX 2004, FreeHand MX, ColdFusion MX 6.1 Developer Edition) $1099.

Yes, I can find them cheaper, but I just took the prices from their websites since that includes no discount and such. Also, right now, the Macromedia Studio MX with Flash Professional is $100 off so would be $999.

Though, price isn’t everything. And the two “packages” aren’t that different in price. But I’m not sure about value.

Well, time will tell. And if the quality of the software goes down, there are other options like GIMPshop (based on GIMP), and Paint Shop. (So many “shops.”)