5 ms·
Much more interesting to me than Apple vs Adobe is Macromedia vs Adobe. Adobe was once a seriously great company (Jobs apparently talked wistfully about those
by bonaldi 17y ago
Much more interesting to me than Apple vs Adobe is Macromedia vs Adobe.
Adobe was once a seriously great company (Jobs apparently talked wistfully about those days in his Q&A), which together with Apple pretty much created desktop publishing and everything that goes with it (like Photoshop, Illustrator, PostScript, PDF, PageMaker, InDesign). The world would be a much worse place without it.
It started going off the rails after founders Geschke and Warnock left but after the Macromedia deal went through in 2005 the lunacy just took off. The only bright spot since then has been Lightroom -- sorry Adobe Photoshop Lightroom -- and even that was a skunkworks project that they had effectively killed until Apple previewed Aperture. All the rest has been just hicky and nasty, and Flash has become endemic (Flash for Photoshop palettes? Really?)
It feels to me as though, rather than being acquired, Macromedia has actually overrun Adobe, to its serious detriment. There's lots of precedent for this in tech deals like this: there were big political struggles in Apple between the incoming NeXT people and the existing Apple people (those struggles emerged as Carbon vs Cocoa, and you can guess who won).
I don't have any insider information on this, but it's interesting to note that all this recent childish posturing and blow-harding about Flash has come from former Macromedia people (this link, the inane blue lego image, everything jdowdell writes). Meanwhile, old Adobe hands like John Nack have been pointing out that, actually, the company's future lies in making great communication tools, not in making sure Flash "wins" a pointless fight.
- cjbos 17y agoWeird, I always looked at Adobe destroying the Macromedia culture, not the other way round? Look at the Flash Player Timeline http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Flash_Player the advances through versions 5 to 8 are spaced 18 months apart and are quite major. Once Adobe took over they shortly upgraded the VM, but the next major release (10) took over 2 years. This was almost 18 months ago, and the only advancements we see really are 10.1 changes to support mobile devices... things have slowed down considerably since Macromedia became Adobe. Oddly enough though I was a big user of JRun (Allaire version) before it was brought out by Macromedia. Saw this product die a horrible death once Adobe brought out Macromedia as well.
- doronba 17y agoInteresting, Macromedia was geared on its flagship products to the internet, While Adobe was essentially revolving around print publications and single user PC software. In that context it makes sense that Macromedia will take the helm in a sensibility.
- jacobolus 17y agoMaybe the kind of people in charge at Adobe who wanted to buy out Macromedia have killed innovation coming from the remains of both companies?
- drewda 17y agoAdobe created PostScript, but since then, almost everything has been an acquisition. - Photoshop from Thomas and John Knoll - PageMaker from Aldus - FrameMaker from Frame - Flash, Flex, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, et al. from Macromedia O.K., Illustrator was developed in-house, but you can almost call that a PostScript editor. And PDF is a more portable version. I don't know the development history of Premier. A copy of Avid? Well, I'm sounding pretty negative about Adobe as a tech innovator (I actually preferred the Macromedia vibe), but I've still paid my bucks for Creative Suite, and I'm a fan of their (mainly well-designed) tools.