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.