19 ms·

Adobe to Acquire Magento

142 points by uptown 8y ago

damon_c 8y ago
Last time I interacted with Magento, one of their customer service people verified my plain text login password over the phone. edit: (it was about 5 years ago)
- tedivm 8y ago
  I honestly don't know how that's possible, as right from the start Magento used a (very crappy) MD5+SALT scheme for password encryption. Here's a 2013 version of their password hashing file[1] which should confirm that they were using the (very crappy) method back then. OSCommerce, which Magenta was attempting to replace, had password hashing as far back as 2006. Maybe you're thinking of a different service? 1. https://github.com/nexcess/magento/blob/master/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Encryption.php https://github.com/nexcess/magento/blob/master/app/code/core...
  - snorlaxle 8y ago
    I know it sounds implied but he didn't say customer service had access to plain text password, just that he verified it over the phone. You can surely do that with hashed password but it's still not a good practice.
    - damon_c 8y ago
      I was not enjoying Magento and my password was something like "MagentoSuck$" I don't remember who I was talking to exactly but they said something like "and you're logging in with the username <whatever> and the password (fading awkwardly) MagentoSucks..."? And we both kind of laughed nervously...
  - bigiain 8y ago
    "Last time I interacted with Magento, one of their customer service people" That sounds to me more like they were dealing with the Meganto support portal rather than the Magento ecommerce software itself - a quick peek right now suggests that's Zen Desk. I don't know if ZenDesk admins have access to cleartext user passwords, or if Magento's ZenDesk agents regularly ask people for passwords and have a means of verifying them - but it's not a good look either way.
  - powelles 8y ago
    A default Magento 1.* install emails a plain text copy of a users password upon account creation. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenMage/magento-mirror/magento-1.9/app/locale/en_US/template/email/account_new.html https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenMage/magento-mirror/ma...
sparrish 8y ago
Seems like a strange purchase for Adobe. How does this fit into their market or ecosystem?
- knicholes 8y ago
  I'm an Adobe employee, but know nothing about the real reasons for the acquisition. We focus on providing great digital experiences for our customers and their customers. Something you may not know is that Adobe is a leader in digital MARKETING. We help people create/monitor/optimize ad campaigns, we help customize website experiences for users, and we help with website creation in general-- Brackets, the IDE, Dreamweaver, all of the other creative products, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics-- it all kind of ties together to help create an end-to-end experience for users, now especially in the commerce arena. Adobe is no stranger to web content creation. Adobe is also focusing on AI, so if they have good talent over there, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to have their predictive analytics tech over on our side. Also, I'm sure Adobe wouldn't mind the large ecosystem of Magento plugin developers writing plugins for https://www.adobe.io https://www.adobe.io. I can imagine this would be a great way to identify people who could benefit from switching from Google Analytics to Adobe Analytics, as well.
  - bdefore 8y ago
    Reads like parody.
    - knicholes 8y ago
      I can see that. And maybe it was written subconsciously so, but the truth remains that Adobe does have its fingers in that pie, and that people think of Photoshop when they hear "Adobe" and not marketing.
    - abraae 8y ago
      Not parody, MARKETING!
      - 8y ago
sumoboy 8y ago
Can we be like Shopify but with more baggage? I think there were better options here.
- bkruse 8y ago
  "We want to buy Shopify but we can pay 1/10th of Shopify's valuation" I think Magento is "fairly priced" priced at ~10% of Shopify's valuation
  - grrowl 8y ago
    The code is already Adobe Quality and with a horrifically overengineered database layer to boot. They'll get along just fine.
SirFatty 8y ago
I cannot see how this is a good thing...
- coldtea 8y ago
  Well, it's real software, open source, used by millions, and it's making its developers some money. That's good enough in my book. And way better than some BS startup that gets billions for "uber for cats" and "self-erasing dick-pics for teens".
  - SirFatty 8y ago
    I'm referring to Adobe purchasing it.
mychael 8y ago
I've never met anyone who uses Magento that actually likes it.
- lhorie 8y ago
  Shrug, I have. (Used to work in an agency where it got chosen over other similar options for its integrations with various things). Plenty of devs dislike working with "boring" industries like e-commerce and plenty more like to hate on anything remotely related to PHP, but that doesn't mean there aren't people actively making a living with those tools exclusively.
  - nicoburns 8y ago
    I like working with modern PHP, but Magento really is a beast of a codebase. I've worked places where it was chosen as the best available (open source) option, but nobody liked working with it...
- tclancy 8y ago
  On the plus side, one of my few interactions with it left me with a bug story that's a solid intro at meetups and interviews: a frontend dev friend was stuck with a problem in Magento back when it was still pretty new and he could not get Amazon Fulfillment working with it. I dug in, did what the docs said, but could not get it working in sandbox mode. Finally, under a time crunch for him and due to schedule tightness on my end, I turned on production mode and everything just worked. End of story. Two days later UPS knocked and I was the accidental owner of some 500 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets I needed to mail back to my friend's client. The only time I've ever had a bug show up in real life at my house.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I don't know if people like it or not, but there certainly are a bunch of high-traffic websites that use it... which is how you end up getting purchased by Adobe. Not quite like getting purchased by Oracle, but still.
- tomc1985 8y ago
ry167 8y ago
This is likely the reason they are shutting down an existing Website platform of theirs, Business Catalyst. [1] While it was a dated system (purchased in 2009) it came as quite a surprise that it was reaching the end of its life. I think it will be very interesting where Adobe takes this [1]: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2470031 https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2470031
- dawnerd 8y ago
  And magento isn't dated? It'd probably make more sense if they bought someone like shopify
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
bhouston 8y ago
So Adobe wants to take on Shopify. Interesting. I wonder if that can work? What is Shopify's long term competitive advantage here? BTW how much was it acquired for?
- blahyawnblah 8y ago
  1.6 Billion
- pauljaworski 8y ago
  Their software isn't terrible.
- drivingmenuts 8y ago
  It's not Magento. Shopify is a more modern implementation - easier to configure and done so in a manner that is not new-user unfriendly. Which is not to say it's friendly, just not totally unfriendly. Note: I got turned down by Magento over a year ago. Not sure if I'm still biased or not.
  - hitekker 8y ago
    I’d say your willingness to disclaim a potential bias lends credence to your claim.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  I didn't assume that. My hunch is Adobe wants to create something similar to Shopify but for larger mid-sized and true enterprise entities. Sure many use Shopify but not necessarily because they want to.
  - bhouston 8y ago
    Shopify is trying to move up market as there are more profits available from larger customers.
    - levashovbiz 8y ago
muxator 8y ago
Ah, Magento. It's "smart" EAV[0] Database schema gave my colleagues so much good time. I do not know how it became in more recent versions, but at the time I distinctly remember them dealing with abysmal DB performances and completely gibberish auto-generated queries. In one case, I had to manually dig through the DB and write an ad-hoc query to extract data that was needed for reporting, otherwise the software would start doing a gazillion of round trips between a DB lookup, an AS-level computation, another DB lookup... That DB design tasted of super-mega-premature optimization, in which the developers wanted to guarantee extensibility at all costs, foregoing in the process the design of an actual data model. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80...
- devy 8y ago
  They had to adopt EAV database schema model because they want to design a schema that can be as generalized and flexible as possible. Obviously performance is the trade off. As a result, every Magneto shop has to use multiple layers of caching, which complicates the maintenance of Magneto, an open-source ecommerce off-the-shelf platform that's supposed to be easier than homebrew your own, ironically.
- meritt 8y ago
  Avoiding the EAV model while still being flexible (e.g. sparse attributes for any variety of products) is one place where the JSON datatype really shines. Throw your non-standard attributes into a JSON object and use the native DB functions to filter accordingly. In Postgres and MySQL 8 you can add conditional/functional/virtual indexes to keep things speedy. Maybe Magento will one day take advantage of these features. It's basically a modern-day approach to Serialized LOB: https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/serializedLOB.html https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/serializedLOB.html
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    That is great advice. Where you are talking about just allowing multiple attributes for a product catalogue you can also do 'EAV light' and have a 'user-defined-attribute' table that goes Sku, attribute_id, value and another table with a simple list of attributes. I have seen this in production (not in Magento) for a product catalogue and performance was satisfactory, queries were fairly simple and maintenance was easy. I think I prefer your JSON solution but this keeps very much in line with standard relational thinking.
somecallitblues 8y ago
They’ll drive it into the ground like what they did with Business Catalyst. The things will get stuck in middle management who doesn’t know web.
RyanShook 8y ago
This seems like a very weird match.
tomcooks 8y ago
Let me know in 5 years how delicious the corporate you're eating is, I guess. Blah.
tambourine_man 8y ago
I’ve made a pretty good money over the years with Magento and even though I’d still recommend it to clients (since there’s no better alternative) every interaction with it is painful. To the point where I mentally add an “insalubrity” tax to every Magento invoice I make. I don’t know how to feel about this accquisition. I already depend on Adobe a lot more than I’d like to, and this makes it no better.
- Shebanator 8y ago
  upvoted for new vocabulary word....
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
    Which one?
    - throwaway413 8y ago
      the one in quotes
      - tambourine_man 8y ago
        Glad to be of service :)
        throwaway413 8y ago
        Not OP but I’ll admit I googled it as well :P
- leviathant 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, are you familiar with Workarea? Seems to fit pretty squarely in the 'better alternative' category,at least for medium-sized and up companies.
  - tambourine_man 8y ago
desireco42 8y ago
So a company whose fantastic products are also known to take forever to load even on most performant machines, acquires a ecommerce that looks good on the outside, but it is pain to run in every scenario :). Kind of make sense in some weird way.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rpncreator 8y ago
This is not Adobe's first e-commerce dance. Adobe attempted an acquisition of Hybris Software, a Java-based e-commerce platform back in 2013 (see first link). This would have meshed well with their Adobe Experience Manager, their CMS solution (an integration already existed, and was also based on Java/Spring). SAP offered Hybris the opportunity to operate independently for two years, and Hybris was acquired by SAP. What is surprising is how AEM and Magento will integrate, considering that AEM is a Java/Maven based CMS and Magento is PHP. (And yes, the article doesn't seem relevant, but contains an important reference) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-09/steve-young-is-an-athlete-who-s-actually-good-at-finance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-09/steve-you...
- sratner 8y ago
  Also Business Catalyst, acquired in 2009 and shut down this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Catalyst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Catalyst
- TheSockStealer 8y ago
  They have actually had a partnership/integration for ~2 years. Basically it comes down to using AEM as the "Glass" in front of Magento. Basically just using Magento as an API and doing all of the front-end with AEM. I know there are a couple of big sites that have gone this direction, but I think the M2 API is still not feature rich enough to make it work easily.
- adrr 8y ago
  SAP acquisition makes more since they sell ERP software and there is a synergy between back office and commerce systems. I still don't understand Adobe acquisition since they do analytics and creative software.
sleighboy 8y ago
eBay/PayPal bought and sold Magento before this. When a payment processor that could embed and make its' offerings the optimal experience within a heavily-used ecomm platform decides to ditch it, I think you have a dud.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ppeetteerr 8y ago
Adobe is looking more like a holding company trying to grow their membership offerings than a company building a cohesive product. It's similar to how Microsoft is acquiring successful companies but having a hard time incorporating them into their ecosystem (Skype, anyone?). I don't see this going well for either Adobe or Magento. Remember when Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed Fireworks? And then Sketch came in and neatly filled the void? That's kind of what Adobe appears to do to companies. I'm not saying Adobe is bad, but their diverse portfolio of products won't be well integrated for years and in that time, there is the possibility of killing a brand simply because it does not keep up with time (and competition). Good luck, Adobe.
- briansage 8y ago
  Adobe's behavior makes me think more of Oracle than Microsoft: Acquire a product with a competitive moat, reskin a year later but change no features, attach an enterprise sales force to it to wring the hell out of every last subscription dollar you can get, and then maybe release a few substantive changes when sales begin to slide.
  - jimnotgym 8y ago
    We took our company off Magento enterprise and onto community. We paid to have the features we wanted from Enterprise developed on community exactly because there was no guarantee that the price of Enterprise wouldn't get racked up every year. Feeling good about that decision today
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  >Remember when Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed Fireworks? And Freehand, RIP.
- detritus 8y ago
  nah, Adobe's just seen the massive benefit to their annual bottom line for anything with a subscription model, so it seems a neat fit to bring in a subscription eCommerce brand which is, in a practical sense, the nexus of 'Creative', code and web application. Frankly, I now hate Adobe with a passion (because lock-in rip off), so I don't wish them any luck.
tomelders 8y ago
Makes a lot of sense. Adobe has some warped ideas about what makes something good.
victor106 8y ago
Having worked on Hybris and Magento and a few other eCommerce platforms, Hybris is the best of the bunch. When I say best only relatively...it has its own headaches but at least its not as horrific as Magento
jsntrmn 8y ago
This acquisition has piqued my interest moreso than your average bear because I work for a major retailer that just so happens to be heavily invested in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). We are using AEM strictly as a CMS and are otherwise heavily invested in Oracle Endeca to drive commerce from a search/nav perspective. And then there's the whole payment and order management issue which we handle with custom, in-house solutions. I'm a little scared to hear all the horrible experiences with Magento because I'm a developer on our search team and working with Endeca (or any Oracle product for that matter) is an absolute nightmare. I flat out hate Endeca. We'll be due for a replatform in another few years (once the business gets sick of us trying to bolt on big data features to Endeca, which just wasn't built for such). I can imagine us going the Magento route since we already have hefty contracts in place with Adobe. I've tried to pitch a custom solution based on Elasticsearch (or Solr directly) but my director and VP don't want to hear about anything that involves building various business user UIs from scratch. Endeca provides a (sigh... Flash based) UI that gets the job done, and on top of that we have several legacy apps with (can't believe I'm saying this in 2018) UIs written in classic ASP. Other than Shopify or Workarea, are there any platforms you, the ever-full-of-knowledge gurus of HN would recommend? I really like both of the aforementioned products because they give you a lot of useful UIs out the box (in addition to the capabilities of the platforms themselves), but they also give you a lot of content management and we don't need that.
- brogrammernot 8y ago
  I totally understand the fear your VP have. It’s much harder(expensive) to find developers who have to manage their own ES or Solr instance instead of just making minimal enhancements to a base product that “works”. It sounds like solid risk management which is what most companies (large) end up hiring people at that level for. If you’re wanting to build newer things with newer technology then you should find a new role.
  - jsntrmn 8y ago
    I suppose you've hit the nail on the head with your final sentence. I do agree with you, though, that my VP is making the appropriate decision given that we're a large enterprise. At the end of the day, whether I'm a cog in the wheel of a huge machine or a decisive voice at a small startup, the engineer in me just wants to see the best solution realized. I guess that's why I still care, when in reality, I should probably be considering a move elsewhere. Thank you for your input!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
krsdcbl 8y ago
Right now, i am picturing the heap of something traditionally garbled out by Adobe "webdesign software". Then I remember all the fun and the "good times" I had in my life building shops with Magento. I'm kinda scared of whatever Adobe is up to here...
dandare 8y ago
Tangential: I am not familiar with Magento and is not easy to identify what they do from their website. The "Why Magento" section is especially useless.
- Raphmedia 8y ago
  Magento is the company. The product is main Magento Commerce: https://magento.com/products/magento-commerce https://magento.com/products/magento-commerce
paulie_a 8y ago
So basically run away from Magento now that Adobe is involved.
maxsupport 8y ago
From the company that brought you ColdFusion...
simonsarris 8y ago
The eCommerce/fintech/small-biz-tech space generally is really heating up this year. Small timeline: * Verifone was acquired in early April. * Square acquires Weebly in late April (to round out itself in eCommerce, which was its weakness vs Shopify) * PayPal acquires iZettle in May (to compete with SQ where they failed in the past with its homegrown product) * Square just yesterday issues $750 in convertible notes (I have a lot of speculation on this one, but something big is brewing) * Adobe acquired Magento today (SHOP stock way down on the news) Earlier, when Amazon mulled p2p payments (Square has Cash App, PYPL has Venmo), both stocks dip on the announcement, which was otherwise pretty hollow PR. Amazon actually had a Square/iZettle competitor called Amazon Register that they shut down back in 2015, so I would not be surprised if they want to get back into transaction spaces. Also wouldn't be surprised if they made a bid for SHOP or SQ within 2 years in order to get into eCommerce and small biz tech generally. Both SQ and SHOP and PYPL have had nice years, stock price wise. Disclosure: I'm watching this space very closely and am long SQ, AMZN.
- MagnitudeFC 8y ago
  Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on SHOP as an investment? Do you think Square (now that they've acquired Weebly will be able to slow down their growth)? Also, SHOP is sitting on >1.3B of cash and their new CFO hinted at an acquisition - any guesses on who/what kind of business might be a good acquisition for them?

142 points by uptown 8y ago

Last time I interacted with Magento, one of their customer service people verified my plain text login password over the phone. edit: (it was about 5 years ago)

tedivm 8y ago
I honestly don't know how that's possible, as right from the start Magento used a (very crappy) MD5+SALT scheme for password encryption. Here's a 2013 version of their password hashing file[1] which should confirm that they were using the (very crappy) method back then. OSCommerce, which Magenta was attempting to replace, had password hashing as far back as 2006. Maybe you're thinking of a different service? 1. https://github.com/nexcess/magento/blob/master/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Encryption.php https://github.com/nexcess/magento/blob/master/app/code/core...
- snorlaxle 8y ago
  I know it sounds implied but he didn't say customer service had access to plain text password, just that he verified it over the phone. You can surely do that with hashed password but it's still not a good practice.
  - damon_c 8y ago
    I was not enjoying Magento and my password was something like "MagentoSuck$" I don't remember who I was talking to exactly but they said something like "and you're logging in with the username <whatever> and the password (fading awkwardly) MagentoSucks..."? And we both kind of laughed nervously...
- bigiain 8y ago
  "Last time I interacted with Magento, one of their customer service people" That sounds to me more like they were dealing with the Meganto support portal rather than the Magento ecommerce software itself - a quick peek right now suggests that's Zen Desk. I don't know if ZenDesk admins have access to cleartext user passwords, or if Magento's ZenDesk agents regularly ask people for passwords and have a means of verifying them - but it's not a good look either way.
- powelles 8y ago
  A default Magento 1.* install emails a plain text copy of a users password upon account creation. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenMage/magento-mirror/magento-1.9/app/locale/en_US/template/email/account_new.html https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpenMage/magento-mirror/ma...

sparrish 8y ago

Seems like a strange purchase for Adobe. How does this fit into their market or ecosystem?

knicholes 8y ago
I'm an Adobe employee, but know nothing about the real reasons for the acquisition. We focus on providing great digital experiences for our customers and their customers. Something you may not know is that Adobe is a leader in digital MARKETING. We help people create/monitor/optimize ad campaigns, we help customize website experiences for users, and we help with website creation in general-- Brackets, the IDE, Dreamweaver, all of the other creative products, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics-- it all kind of ties together to help create an end-to-end experience for users, now especially in the commerce arena. Adobe is no stranger to web content creation. Adobe is also focusing on AI, so if they have good talent over there, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to have their predictive analytics tech over on our side. Also, I'm sure Adobe wouldn't mind the large ecosystem of Magento plugin developers writing plugins for https://www.adobe.io https://www.adobe.io. I can imagine this would be a great way to identify people who could benefit from switching from Google Analytics to Adobe Analytics, as well.
- bdefore 8y ago
  Reads like parody.
  - knicholes 8y ago
    I can see that. And maybe it was written subconsciously so, but the truth remains that Adobe does have its fingers in that pie, and that people think of Photoshop when they hear "Adobe" and not marketing.
  - abraae 8y ago
    Not parody, MARKETING!
    - 8y ago

sumoboy 8y ago

Can we be like Shopify but with more baggage? I think there were better options here.

bkruse 8y ago
"We want to buy Shopify but we can pay 1/10th of Shopify's valuation" I think Magento is "fairly priced" priced at ~10% of Shopify's valuation
- grrowl 8y ago
  The code is already Adobe Quality and with a horrifically overengineered database layer to boot. They'll get along just fine.

SirFatty 8y ago

I cannot see how this is a good thing...

coldtea 8y ago
Well, it's real software, open source, used by millions, and it's making its developers some money. That's good enough in my book. And way better than some BS startup that gets billions for "uber for cats" and "self-erasing dick-pics for teens".
- SirFatty 8y ago
  I'm referring to Adobe purchasing it.

mychael 8y ago

I've never met anyone who uses Magento that actually likes it.

lhorie 8y ago
Shrug, I have. (Used to work in an agency where it got chosen over other similar options for its integrations with various things). Plenty of devs dislike working with "boring" industries like e-commerce and plenty more like to hate on anything remotely related to PHP, but that doesn't mean there aren't people actively making a living with those tools exclusively.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  I like working with modern PHP, but Magento really is a beast of a codebase. I've worked places where it was chosen as the best available (open source) option, but nobody liked working with it...
tclancy 8y ago
On the plus side, one of my few interactions with it left me with a bug story that's a solid intro at meetups and interviews: a frontend dev friend was stuck with a problem in Magento back when it was still pretty new and he could not get Amazon Fulfillment working with it. I dug in, did what the docs said, but could not get it working in sandbox mode. Finally, under a time crunch for him and due to schedule tightness on my end, I turned on production mode and everything just worked. End of story. Two days later UPS knocked and I was the accidental owner of some 500 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets I needed to mail back to my friend's client. The only time I've ever had a bug show up in real life at my house.
greglindahl 8y ago
I don't know if people like it or not, but there certainly are a bunch of high-traffic websites that use it... which is how you end up getting purchased by Adobe. Not quite like getting purchased by Oracle, but still.
tomc1985 8y ago

ry167 8y ago

This is likely the reason they are shutting down an existing Website platform of theirs, Business Catalyst. [1] While it was a dated system (purchased in 2009) it came as quite a surprise that it was reaching the end of its life. I think it will be very interesting where Adobe takes this [1]: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2470031 https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2470031

dawnerd 8y ago
And magento isn't dated? It'd probably make more sense if they bought someone like shopify
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

bhouston 8y ago

So Adobe wants to take on Shopify. Interesting. I wonder if that can work? What is Shopify's long term competitive advantage here? BTW how much was it acquired for?

blahyawnblah 8y ago
1.6 Billion
pauljaworski 8y ago
Their software isn't terrible.
drivingmenuts 8y ago
It's not Magento. Shopify is a more modern implementation - easier to configure and done so in a manner that is not new-user unfriendly. Which is not to say it's friendly, just not totally unfriendly. Note: I got turned down by Magento over a year ago. Not sure if I'm still biased or not.
- hitekker 8y ago
  I’d say your willingness to disclaim a potential bias lends credence to your claim.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
I didn't assume that. My hunch is Adobe wants to create something similar to Shopify but for larger mid-sized and true enterprise entities. Sure many use Shopify but not necessarily because they want to.
- bhouston 8y ago
  Shopify is trying to move up market as there are more profits available from larger customers.
  - levashovbiz 8y ago

muxator 8y ago

Ah, Magento. It's "smart" EAV[0] Database schema gave my colleagues so much good time. I do not know how it became in more recent versions, but at the time I distinctly remember them dealing with abysmal DB performances and completely gibberish auto-generated queries. In one case, I had to manually dig through the DB and write an ad-hoc query to extract data that was needed for reporting, otherwise the software would start doing a gazillion of round trips between a DB lookup, an AS-level computation, another DB lookup... That DB design tasted of super-mega-premature optimization, in which the developers wanted to guarantee extensibility at all costs, foregoing in the process the design of an actual data model. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80...

devy 8y ago
They had to adopt EAV database schema model because they want to design a schema that can be as generalized and flexible as possible. Obviously performance is the trade off. As a result, every Magneto shop has to use multiple layers of caching, which complicates the maintenance of Magneto, an open-source ecommerce off-the-shelf platform that's supposed to be easier than homebrew your own, ironically.
meritt 8y ago
Avoiding the EAV model while still being flexible (e.g. sparse attributes for any variety of products) is one place where the JSON datatype really shines. Throw your non-standard attributes into a JSON object and use the native DB functions to filter accordingly. In Postgres and MySQL 8 you can add conditional/functional/virtual indexes to keep things speedy. Maybe Magento will one day take advantage of these features. It's basically a modern-day approach to Serialized LOB: https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/serializedLOB.html https://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/serializedLOB.html
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  That is great advice. Where you are talking about just allowing multiple attributes for a product catalogue you can also do 'EAV light' and have a 'user-defined-attribute' table that goes Sku, attribute_id, value and another table with a simple list of attributes. I have seen this in production (not in Magento) for a product catalogue and performance was satisfactory, queries were fairly simple and maintenance was easy. I think I prefer your JSON solution but this keeps very much in line with standard relational thinking.

somecallitblues 8y ago

They’ll drive it into the ground like what they did with Business Catalyst. The things will get stuck in middle management who doesn’t know web.

RyanShook 8y ago

This seems like a very weird match.

tomcooks 8y ago

Let me know in 5 years how delicious the corporate you're eating is, I guess. Blah.

tambourine_man 8y ago

I’ve made a pretty good money over the years with Magento and even though I’d still recommend it to clients (since there’s no better alternative) every interaction with it is painful. To the point where I mentally add an “insalubrity” tax to every Magento invoice I make. I don’t know how to feel about this accquisition. I already depend on Adobe a lot more than I’d like to, and this makes it no better.

Shebanator 8y ago
upvoted for new vocabulary word....
- tambourine_man 8y ago
  Which one?
  - throwaway413 8y ago
    the one in quotes
    - tambourine_man 8y ago
      Glad to be of service :)
      - throwaway413 8y ago
        Not OP but I’ll admit I googled it as well :P
leviathant 8y ago
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with Workarea? Seems to fit pretty squarely in the 'better alternative' category,at least for medium-sized and up companies.
- tambourine_man 8y ago

desireco42 8y ago

So a company whose fantastic products are also known to take forever to load even on most performant machines, acquires a ecommerce that looks good on the outside, but it is pain to run in every scenario :). Kind of make sense in some weird way.

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rpncreator 8y ago

This is not Adobe's first e-commerce dance. Adobe attempted an acquisition of Hybris Software, a Java-based e-commerce platform back in 2013 (see first link). This would have meshed well with their Adobe Experience Manager, their CMS solution (an integration already existed, and was also based on Java/Spring). SAP offered Hybris the opportunity to operate independently for two years, and Hybris was acquired by SAP. What is surprising is how AEM and Magento will integrate, considering that AEM is a Java/Maven based CMS and Magento is PHP. (And yes, the article doesn't seem relevant, but contains an important reference) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-09/steve-young-is-an-athlete-who-s-actually-good-at-finance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-09/steve-you...

sratner 8y ago
Also Business Catalyst, acquired in 2009 and shut down this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Catalyst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Catalyst
TheSockStealer 8y ago
They have actually had a partnership/integration for ~2 years. Basically it comes down to using AEM as the "Glass" in front of Magento. Basically just using Magento as an API and doing all of the front-end with AEM. I know there are a couple of big sites that have gone this direction, but I think the M2 API is still not feature rich enough to make it work easily.
adrr 8y ago
SAP acquisition makes more since they sell ERP software and there is a synergy between back office and commerce systems. I still don't understand Adobe acquisition since they do analytics and creative software.

sleighboy 8y ago

eBay/PayPal bought and sold Magento before this. When a payment processor that could embed and make its' offerings the optimal experience within a heavily-used ecomm platform decides to ditch it, I think you have a dud.

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ppeetteerr 8y ago

Adobe is looking more like a holding company trying to grow their membership offerings than a company building a cohesive product. It's similar to how Microsoft is acquiring successful companies but having a hard time incorporating them into their ecosystem (Skype, anyone?). I don't see this going well for either Adobe or Magento. Remember when Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed Fireworks? And then Sketch came in and neatly filled the void? That's kind of what Adobe appears to do to companies. I'm not saying Adobe is bad, but their diverse portfolio of products won't be well integrated for years and in that time, there is the possibility of killing a brand simply because it does not keep up with time (and competition). Good luck, Adobe.

briansage 8y ago
Adobe's behavior makes me think more of Oracle than Microsoft: Acquire a product with a competitive moat, reskin a year later but change no features, attach an enterprise sales force to it to wring the hell out of every last subscription dollar you can get, and then maybe release a few substantive changes when sales begin to slide.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  We took our company off Magento enterprise and onto community. We paid to have the features we wanted from Enterprise developed on community exactly because there was no guarantee that the price of Enterprise wouldn't get racked up every year. Feeling good about that decision today
tambourine_man 8y ago
>Remember when Adobe acquired Macromedia and killed Fireworks? And Freehand, RIP.
detritus 8y ago
nah, Adobe's just seen the massive benefit to their annual bottom line for anything with a subscription model, so it seems a neat fit to bring in a subscription eCommerce brand which is, in a practical sense, the nexus of 'Creative', code and web application. Frankly, I now hate Adobe with a passion (because lock-in rip off), so I don't wish them any luck.

tomelders 8y ago

Makes a lot of sense. Adobe has some warped ideas about what makes something good.

victor106 8y ago

Having worked on Hybris and Magento and a few other eCommerce platforms, Hybris is the best of the bunch. When I say best only relatively...it has its own headaches but at least its not as horrific as Magento

jsntrmn 8y ago

This acquisition has piqued my interest moreso than your average bear because I work for a major retailer that just so happens to be heavily invested in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). We are using AEM strictly as a CMS and are otherwise heavily invested in Oracle Endeca to drive commerce from a search/nav perspective. And then there's the whole payment and order management issue which we handle with custom, in-house solutions. I'm a little scared to hear all the horrible experiences with Magento because I'm a developer on our search team and working with Endeca (or any Oracle product for that matter) is an absolute nightmare. I flat out hate Endeca. We'll be due for a replatform in another few years (once the business gets sick of us trying to bolt on big data features to Endeca, which just wasn't built for such). I can imagine us going the Magento route since we already have hefty contracts in place with Adobe. I've tried to pitch a custom solution based on Elasticsearch (or Solr directly) but my director and VP don't want to hear about anything that involves building various business user UIs from scratch. Endeca provides a (sigh... Flash based) UI that gets the job done, and on top of that we have several legacy apps with (can't believe I'm saying this in 2018) UIs written in classic ASP. Other than Shopify or Workarea, are there any platforms you, the ever-full-of-knowledge gurus of HN would recommend? I really like both of the aforementioned products because they give you a lot of useful UIs out the box (in addition to the capabilities of the platforms themselves), but they also give you a lot of content management and we don't need that.

brogrammernot 8y ago
I totally understand the fear your VP have. It’s much harder(expensive) to find developers who have to manage their own ES or Solr instance instead of just making minimal enhancements to a base product that “works”. It sounds like solid risk management which is what most companies (large) end up hiring people at that level for. If you’re wanting to build newer things with newer technology then you should find a new role.
- jsntrmn 8y ago
  I suppose you've hit the nail on the head with your final sentence. I do agree with you, though, that my VP is making the appropriate decision given that we're a large enterprise. At the end of the day, whether I'm a cog in the wheel of a huge machine or a decisive voice at a small startup, the engineer in me just wants to see the best solution realized. I guess that's why I still care, when in reality, I should probably be considering a move elsewhere. Thank you for your input!

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krsdcbl 8y ago

Right now, i am picturing the heap of something traditionally garbled out by Adobe "webdesign software". Then I remember all the fun and the "good times" I had in my life building shops with Magento. I'm kinda scared of whatever Adobe is up to here...

dandare 8y ago

Tangential: I am not familiar with Magento and is not easy to identify what they do from their website. The "Why Magento" section is especially useless.

Raphmedia 8y ago
Magento is the company. The product is main Magento Commerce: https://magento.com/products/magento-commerce https://magento.com/products/magento-commerce

paulie_a 8y ago

So basically run away from Magento now that Adobe is involved.

maxsupport 8y ago

From the company that brought you ColdFusion...

simonsarris 8y ago

The eCommerce/fintech/small-biz-tech space generally is really heating up this year. Small timeline: * Verifone was acquired in early April. * Square acquires Weebly in late April (to round out itself in eCommerce, which was its weakness vs Shopify) * PayPal acquires iZettle in May (to compete with SQ where they failed in the past with its homegrown product) * Square just yesterday issues $750 in convertible notes (I have a lot of speculation on this one, but something big is brewing) * Adobe acquired Magento today (SHOP stock way down on the news) Earlier, when Amazon mulled p2p payments (Square has Cash App, PYPL has Venmo), both stocks dip on the announcement, which was otherwise pretty hollow PR. Amazon actually had a Square/iZettle competitor called Amazon Register that they shut down back in 2015, so I would not be surprised if they want to get back into transaction spaces. Also wouldn't be surprised if they made a bid for SHOP or SQ within 2 years in order to get into eCommerce and small biz tech generally. Both SQ and SHOP and PYPL have had nice years, stock price wise. Disclosure: I'm watching this space very closely and am long SQ, AMZN.

MagnitudeFC 8y ago
Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on SHOP as an investment? Do you think Square (now that they've acquired Weebly will be able to slow down their growth)? Also, SHOP is sitting on >1.3B of cash and their new CFO hinted at an acquisition - any guesses on who/what kind of business might be a good acquisition for them?