Adobe acquires Macromedia

This morning’s big news is that Macro­me­dia is being acquired by Adobe. Read­ing through the announce­ment, it is hard to say whether this will come to pass or not, as there are many monop­oly issues sur­round­ing this deal.

Side by Side

The biggest impact will prob­a­bly be felt on the low end of the cre­ative space. Here’s a run­down of the upcom­ing bat­tles to come as a result of this acqui­si­tion (this is based on the prod­uct sheets on the Macro­me­dia and the Adobe sites) and my pre­dic­tions on who will win each:

Vec­tor Graph­ics: Free­hand vs. Illustrator

While Free­hand got a nice fol­low­ing, I believe this one will end up with Illus­tra­tor win­ning, largely due to its installed base. Expect the Flash inte­gra­tion to come into future ver­sions of Illus­tra­tor and the Free­hand plat­form to be de-emphasized

Dig­i­tal Imag­ing: Pho­to­shop vs. Fireworks

Once again, advan­tage Adobe, largely due to the larger fea­ture set and the wide­spread devel­op­ment com­mu­nity that has brought exten­sions to it. How­ever, expect the opti­mize for web sec­tion of the pro­gram to improve as these will be worked on by the old Fire­works team.

Web Author­ing: Dreamweaver vs. GoLive

Advan­tage Macro­me­dia. While GoLive is a nice prod­uct, the Dreamweaver suite has a richer set of oper­a­tions and is bet­ter inte­grated with other parts of the prod­uct suite (Flash, Cold­Fu­sion, etc…) and I believe one of the key rea­sons Adobe is acquir­ing Macro­me­dia is to gain a strong foothold in the web space. Expect more inte­gra­tion of the Acro­bat suite into Dreamweaver.

Fonts: Fontog­ra­pher vs. the Adobe Type Library

Say good­bye to Fontog­ra­pher, which just isn’t a player in that space, con­sid­er­ing the lead Adobe has.

Web Pub­lish­ing Sys­tems: Macro­me­dia suites vs. Acro­bat server

Win­ner in this cat­e­gory will be the suite of prod­ucts offered by Macro­me­dia. I believe this sits at the core of the acqui­si­tion and that the Acro­bat server suite will be merged into the Macro­me­dia offerings.

XML han­dling: Flex vs. Framemaker

Ini­tial advan­tage to Framemaker but short lived, as migra­tion path moves it to Flex-based approach. Once again, web trumps legacy. How­ever, one even­tual vic­tim of this is Direc­tor, which ends up being killed in the process (and I would note hold my breath for the Robo­Help, RoboDemo, and RoboInfo suites to sur­vive for long either.)

For­mats: PDF vs. Flash

Tie and win for both. I think both for­mats will evolve but both will sur­vive this. Tying the two is obvi­ously part of the strat­egy. What I sus­pect is that we will see an end-to-end prod­uct offer­ing inte­gra­tion of the whole thing from paper to web and back

Monop­oly?

One could argue that the merger will cre­ate a monop­oly sit­u­a­tion in the cre­ative space. How­ever, I think this deal will pass in the US and Europe as it will be pre­sented as Adobe+Macromedia vs. Microsoft, Apple, and oth­ers. A care­ful dis­sec­tion shows that it’s not the case (as it will give the new com­pany a sub­stan­tial share of the cre­ative mar­ket) and makes me think of an ad I saw for Adobe this week­end: the slo­gan for the new Adobe Cre­ative Suite is “every­thing but the idea” and it looks like they are now indeed mak­ing good on the promise an offer­ing cre­ative types a mar­ket­place where “every­thing from Adobe” is the only choice (and before you com­ment about other offer­ings, ask your­self, what is their mar­ket share vs. Adobe+Macromedia?)