Today’s top news should prove interesting to follow:
Adobe said the Macromedia purchase, Adobe’s biggest-ever takeover, brings together two “complementary” products. Adobe is paying 43.8 times operating profit and 7.5 times sales for Macromedia, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Source: Bloomberg
What will happen to the Macromedia products where Adobe offers a similar product?
- golive vs. dreamweaver
- photoshop vs. fireworks
- illustrator vs. freehand
I’ve used all of the above software, except Golive, at different intervals and for various length of time in the past couple of years. I’m sure a couple of these tools will be discontinued very soon. Or continued half-heartedly and then dropped like Allaire HomeSite.
The deal itself is not without issues from a competition standpoint since the resulting business will almost certainly hold a sizeable chunk of the GUI market that would make it difficult for some smaller vendors to play in. The companies have overlapping product sets and a product portfolio that goes in many different directions.
Source: Silicon Republic
I seriously doubt that Adobe will kill DW. Fireworks and Freehand aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as Photoshop/Illustrator. But GoLive is pretty lousy. I think Adobe bought MM for 2 reasons: 1)Get Flash (most important) and 2)Get a web editing tool (DW) because they realized they’d GoLive had lost.
There you go again Adobe. I do web design and sound editing. The last product/company I liked that Adobe took over was Cool Edit Pro/Syntrillium. That was a fiasco. They just stuck a new box around the product and took away all of the personalized support. I guess that’s the way of the giant corporate world; if you can’t beat ’em buy ’em!
via Kottke;
Dave Winer […] compares the Adobe/MM acquisition to MM’s purchase of Allaire: “Remember all the hooplah over the Allaire-Macromedia acquisition, and all the synergies that were supposed to happen. Hmmm. Did any happen? BusinessWeek didn’t think so. Will any happen here? Heh. Slightly more exciting than Microsoft’s acquisition of Groove.”
I’m rather sceptic about how well they will manage to forge all the handy functions into next generation releases. I agree – they are likely to conduct some market researches and then declare dropping this and that product was only reasonable. That’s what you get at takeovers, and that’s why I generally don’t favour fusions of this size…