Adobe Systems, Inc. has released a press release stating that Adobe is in the process of acquiring Macromedia for $3.4 billion dollars with the deal to close this Fall 2005. According to Adobe, “The combination of Adobe and Macromedia 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. 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.”
According to Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe, “Customers are calling for integrated software solutions that enable them to create, manage and deliver a wide range of compelling content and applications – from documents and images to audio and video. By combining our powerful development, authoring and collaboration software – along with the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash – Adobe has the opportunity to bring this vision to life with an industry-defining technology platform”
This all sounds good. A couple of questions one has to wonder about, though is what will happen to Dreamweaver and what will become of Freehand? Macromedia Dreamweaver is the Internet’s most popular web page creation package, which is a direct competitor to Adobe’s GoLive. On the other hand, Macromedia Freehand is less popular than Adobe Illustrator, but has a devoted and vocal core following.
It will be interesting to see if the future will bring Adobe Dreamweaver to the forefront and stop GoLive altogether, leaving it to go die? Also, will Freehand be tied up and left to sink while Illustrator takes center stage with only the distant second cousin CorelDraw as the only competition left? And what kind of coupe would Corel be for a second takeover target. Adobe has been long-know for “buying the competition” so Adobe’s most recent move should surprise no one. Less competition only makes Adobe that much stronger.
