I heard this morning that Adobe are to Acquire Macromedia for $3.4 Billion.

Adobe, whose products include the industry standard graphics software, Photoshop, and the pdf format, will now own the Flash format and add the standard web page editor Dreamweaver and graphics packages Fireworks and Freehand to its offerings.

While I’ve no gripe with Adobe, this buyout places an awful lot of power in their hands. I think it is vital to have a number of major players in the web development software industry or any other for that matter. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

On a personal level, I’m most concerned about what will become of Macromedia Fireworks. While I am not a designer and have very limited graphic skills, Fireworks is my weapon of choice. For some reason, I just cannot get my head around Photoshop full stop! I realise that a lot of my issues may be psychological, but I know I am not alone in thinking that the program is not the most intuitive. For making simpler web graphics, I believe Photoshop is not the best tool. Fireworks was developed specifically for that purpose and it shows. However, with most of the world now used to only using Photoshop (and its hefty price tag), I fear that Adobe will get rid of Fireworks. Time will tell.

I suppose it could be worse - Microsoft could have bought Macromedia!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 1:40 pm and is filed under web dev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.