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GoWeaver April
21st 2005
I’ve
kept quiet about this for a couple of days, and digested the news of Adobe
purchasing Macromedia. Now that I’ve had some time to reflect, I’ll
give my take on it.
For the average designer, whether that be web, print, or otherwise. This is bad news. Macromedia has effectively been one of the last hold outs, to continue to compete (and in some cases, outshine the Adobe platform) this acquisition can only mean that competition in the market is going to be limited, and innovations stifled. The best that we can hope for in this is that Adobe will let the developers continue to do what they have done, which is bring a kickass product to the table. (Dreamweaver has been the superior product to GoLive pretty much since day one in my book.)
But more than likely what will happen in 6 months we’ll see a bastardized version of Dreamweaver come out, with a shiny new GoLive sticker on top of it.
I’ve heard others predict that Freehand is going the way of the dodo, and frankly I couldn’t be happier. (Illustrator has owned this slot for long enough that I see this as no big loss.)
Image Ready will be phased out, (like it should’ve been ever since the save for web function was added to Photoshop) and Fireworks will take its place.
Now I’m just wondering how long it will be before Adobe takes a stab at taking over Quark. It’s been coming for a long time, and I’ve been dreading it the whole way. If this were to happen it would be horrendous for the design sector. Adobe would become the Microsoft of visual apps, and we could look forward to many years of the same crap being repackaged with effectively no improvements.
If we’re
lucky, another developer will step up and fill the power vacuum that the departure
of Macromedia is surely going to leave.