Adobe acquired Macromedia!

April 18, 2005 – 4:23 pm by coachwei | Category Main Page |

Adobe acquired Macromedia!

 

This is a natural marriage between two similar companies. It is a long anticipated move for Adobe:

1. Both are very consumer oriented and rely on consumer software packages for most of their revenue;
2. Both serve creative professionals well.
3. Now it effectively creates a “power house” for consumer software applications.

An interesting implication of this, which both Adobe and Macromedia know well, is to combine content (document, forms, video and audio) and applications. Macromedia already developed Flex for this. Adobe has been trying to move into enterprise by creating more server products, and also been looking at Rich Client for a few years. From a consumer facing web site and light web application perspective, the combined entity can potential create a good solution for adding richness and interactivity to web content and web applications, even for mobile devices.

 

Both Adobe and Macromedia have ambitions to move into the enterprise space. In order to grow, enterprise space is the natural “must do” for the combined entity.  It would be a tough transition – there are culture challenges, business model challenges as well as technology challenges. They have got lots to learn and there is no guarantee that this transition will be successful.

 

Importantly, neither Adobe nore Macromedia knows enterprise space well. More importantly, neither of them knows that they don't know enterprise space well.

 

For example, Macromedia has been investing heavily into Rich Internet Application space ($30MM so far at least). Adobe also has been looking into Rich Client. However, they don't know what is important for enteprrise computing.

 

From an enterprise computing perspective, the biggest challenge of using the Web for business computing is not because it lacks sexy lookandfeel, pretty graphics or animation. It is not because JavaScript or ActionScript is not powerful enough. The fundamental challenge is that the Web is not a reliable and high performance infrastructure. There is no guarantee for reliability and performance. For mission critical enterprise applications, reliability, transactional integrity and performance are “must have” instead of “nice to have”.  This is not a hardware problem. It is not about “sexy animation”. The programing language can not be JavaScript or ActionScript for enterprise applications.  In order for the web to be the infrastructure for mission critical applications, a solution is still needed.

 

This solution is not likely to come from Adobe/Macromedia. The company that Adobe/Macromedia will be fighting against is Microsoft in general. Adobe will be competing against Microsoft for consumer attentions, as well as the upcoming Longhorn for developer mindshare. However, the real solution is more likely to come from startups that know enterprise computing challenges well and can work with both J2EE and .NET.