Yes, its announced at Adobe’s website, Adobe Systems Incorporated will acquire Macromedia Inc. for US$3.4 billion. 😯
This has really come out of the blue when no one expected it!!! And to top it, just before the possible release of Flash Player 8 & then maybe FlashMX 2005. So what we’ll have now? Flash CS 2005 or Photoshop MX 2005 or will it be a hybrid Flash CS 2 MX 2005?
Whatever the versioning system be & whatever the software be called, I for one am not in favour of this merger!!! This is really a bad bad thing to happen for the web & graphics industry!! 👿 Now I might’ve raised some eyebrows here-n-there, so I’ll list out the reasons why I’m not in favour.
- this will virtually create adobe’s monopoly in the graphics & web publishing industry, which is not a good thing at all
- Adobe’s monopoly will result in a slow down in growth & development of the industry, simply because competition & growth/development run hand in hand. Monopoly will make them less innovative. We all remember & know Microsoft’s Internet Explorer afterall. It was a monopoly till FireFox banged on the scene & as soon FireFox started licking up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer’s market, Microsoft was forced to announce the next version of Internet Explorer with more features & more security, even when they’d previously announced that there will be no standalone Internet Explorer for old Windows, if you want new IE, upgrade!!
- everyone knows that Adobe softwares’ UI just suck!! Its not easy to get around while Macromedia is famous for easy to navigate UIs, they believed in Rich Interactive User Experience, afterall, they used to sell the concept(Flash)!!
- Adobe softwares are just resource suckers who lick out our PCs into oblivion. If you’ve ever run an Adobe software like Photoshop for long hours continously, then you’d know what I mean, I’ve seen PCs with Intel Pentium 4 2+ Ghz PCs with 256+MB RAM getting drowsy even when they are running nothing but an Adobe software for long hours, on a decently fast OS like WinXP
- Adobe is money-hungry, biggest sucker of them all, charging a nuke’s cost for a dumb piece of software for which you’ll have to upgrade your hardware endlessly. I seriously believe that the code of Adobe’s softwares is seriously flawed as the result is a highly in-efficient software as far as its performance is concerned. They work great, have cool features, I agree to all of them, but performance wise they just suck!!
These are the strongest reasons for my opposition at the moment(more will come as I think up of them) to this merger.
I really think that the US government should oppose this merger too & do not let it happen!! 😕 This is going to be one big mistake if government & the web & graphics community don’t oppose it, & its gonna cost dearly!! 👿
C’mon Mr.President, his highness George Bush, do atleast something worthwhile in your tenure(which is infact your last), something that doesn’t involve bombing a country!!! 😉