antipopper

I’ll only chime in on the whole “Adobe buys Macromedia” kerfuffle to note that this could be really bad news for the Mac platform. Macromedia has spectacularly mishandled their Mac products for the last few years (to the point where Mac Flash developers are reluctantly switching to Windows). And Adobe’s relationship with Apple doesn’t seem particularly good — why else has Apple been investing so much in the Final Cut Pro Studio, and Core Image? With Macromedia and Adobe together now, I think it’s almost guaranteed that the situation will worsen. On the upside, Mac users will no doubt move to more elegant, leaner products that actually work on their platform, but this might also lead to their re-ghettoization.

UPDATE: Actually, this could also be a good thing on a purely budgetary front for people and organisations who are currently doing things like buying two suites of professional creative software for web development — Macromedia Studio MX and and Adobe Creative Suite. Given the amount of overlap between the two suites, the products within the new Adobe that have the least share of their market, like Freehand, Fireworks and GoLive, are bound to be discontinued, which might then lead to a mega web development suite that encompasses Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and Flash. This might be cheaper for, uh, me. :)