Adobe Aquires Macromedia
SAN JOSE, Calif. – April 18, 2005 – Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.
Having spent the last 7 years working with Macromedia Flash, this news is quite a shock. This is no joke. At a whopping 3.4 bn USD, Adobe have now acquired their long time opponent, effectively killing all competition.
I love Photoshop. I use Dreamweaver and Flash on a daily basis. But somehow, I’m less than thrilled at this news. The competition between Adobe and Macromedia has always been healthy, save for a few lawsuits some years back. It’ll be interesting to see how this pans out.
- Will it be Adobe Flash CS2 or Adobe Livemotion CS2?
- Will Adobe Dreamweaver CS2 come to pass, or will GoLive succeed it?
- What about Fireworks vs. ImageReady? They’re both essentially built with the same purpose.
- Freehand or Illustrator?
- FlashPaper or PDF?
- Flash Player or SVG Player?
- What about Director?
This really doesn’t feel right.
More Resources
- Macromedia Acquisition FAQ (PDF)
From the FAQ: - Is this a merger or an acquisition?
- What will be the name of the combined company?
- Is the combined company committed to Flash as a development platform?
- How does this affect Adobe’s support of SVG (scalable vector graphics)?
Adobe is acquiring Macromedia. However, both companies will benefit greatly from joining forces. Macromedia’s stockholders will own 18 percent of the combined company on a pro forma basis.
Adobe Systems Incorporated.
Yes. Macromedia has made tremendous progress in attracting developers to Flash, and the Flash platform will be a key component of the combined company’s strategy going forward.
Both Adobe and Macromedia have been involved in defining SVG and both were part of the W3C working group that defined SVG. The combined company will continue to work with customers and partners to define a future roadmap for our products.
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For a translation of the adobe press release , look no further than John Gruber .
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I gotta say, Corel's looking really good right now. They've even started a pitch to seek out Freehand users (www.corel.com/fhoffer). To me, Freehand always seemed to steal freatures from CorelDRAW anyways, so I can only imagine Freehand users will feel right at home!
What I'm worried about is GoLive. I detest Dreamweaver and have come to really like GoLive's way of doing things. Lets hope Corel picks it up when (enevitably) Adobe is forced to part with it.
Stu
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