More On Adobe vs Macromedia…

I’ve been read­ing quite a bit about the recently announced Adobe acqu­si­tion of Macromedia and, beyond all the spec­u­la­tion about the future of spe­cific prod­ucts, the one thing that’s start­ing to hit me hard is the dis­a­pear­ance of the Macromedia brand.

Many peo­ple speak of this as a merger but it is not a merger, it’s an acqui­si­tion of a smaller com­pany by a big­ger com­pany and it has very dif­fer­ent impli­ca­tions than a merger. When and if the deal goes through, the Macromedia brand will dis­ap­pear for good and only Adobe will remain. One of the things I’m afraid of is that the com­pany cul­ture of Macromedia might dis­ap­pear with the name and brand and to me this is very bad news. Few soft­ware ven­dors have instilled in me the kind of loy­alty that Macromedia has and cer­tainly no other com­pa­nies of such a large size. I not only love their prod­ucts but they have an open­ness towards their cus­tomers that is unri­valed in the indus­try IMO. Almost all of their key employ­ees have blogs and keep open chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the user com­mu­nity. There is no such open­ness at Adobe that I can see. What I hope is that some of a lot of Macromedia’s cor­po­rate cul­ture seeps into the new Adobe…

The sec­ond thing that both­ers me about this acqui­si­tion is that Adobe is a com­pany that so obvi­ously does NOT “get” the Web. That’s prob­a­bly why they are buy­ing Macromedia who’s the undis­puted leader in Web design and devel­op­ment tools as well as RIAs and online user expe­ri­ence with prod­ucts such as Dreamweaver, Flash, Flex and ColdFusion. I know that Adobe is not stu­pid and we can only hope that they come to rely on the human resources exper­tise of the com­pany they just bought to make deci­sions about future prod­uct devel­op­ment. What I really hate is hav­ing to wait to see how things evolve with­out know­ing if my main soft­ware tools will sur­vive the process.