Macromedia, Adobe make peace for bigger fight (News.com)

Posted Apr 19, 2005 16:16 UTC (Tue) by b7j0c (subscriber, #27559) [Link]

People are reading so much into this, as they do with any merger, but its just consolidation. Macromedia was slowly and surely losing a reason to exist as an independent entity, it had shot its wad with Flash.

Larry Ellison is right, the number of firms selling software is going to rapidly decrease over the next decade.

Posted Apr 19, 2005 20:09 UTC (Tue) by huffd (guest, #10382) [Link]

This was the least interesting article about this merger that I've read. What really trips my trigger is that (from another news source) Adobe now controls 52% of the market segment that M$ desperately wants (needs).

Posted Apr 20, 2005 13:18 UTC (Wed) by cpm (guest, #3554) [Link]

I heard a little blurb on NPR about this yesterday, in which
Yankee group anaylist Laura DiDio was heard to blather something
about how great it all is, and the one thing I heard that
stuck in my craw, was "Since Adobe and Macromedia give their
software away for free, , , , "

And folks just eat this up. What would have been more true
would have been to state, "Since Adobe and Macromedia license
the viewers for their software at no financial cost, ," (locking
in their proprietary blah blah, forcing upgrades at every
turn, blah blah, filling scrap piles with waste that cannot
be disposed of due to the constant hardware upgrades required
by all this garbage blah blah" But no. Adobe and Macromedia
both offer "Free Software".

Am I being a pill?

Yes. I'm really getting kind of fed up with NPR, (whom I really
expect to be less of a corporate shill than Fox News) in their
wholly one-sided views.

Yes..

One sided.

I don't know if anyone else ever listens to Tech Tuesday, but back
on Jan 25th, they did a brilliant job getting huckster Jonathan
Zuck to totally dismiss "free software" as just a fad, in a "discussion"
concerning the release of IBM patents into the free software community.

For a long time, I've accepted that these are complicated discussions
and hard to capture in a sound bite. However, here again, in this
talk about the continued locking in and growth of software
monopolies, The march of FUD continues unabated, in fact, is growing
stronger with each press release.

Posted Apr 21, 2005 1:38 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

Not being particularly interested in Microsoft's vapourware, I haven't
looked up what Avalon might entail, but if it is likely to compete with
the 'convergence' of Flash and PDF, I'm very interested to see the
new Adobe's next moves on SVG.

Scripted SVG, while less concise than either pdf or Flash, is the only
properly free format which is comparable to either. Adobe has been
pushing SVG gently as a Flash competitor, but that is obviously over
now. If Adobe chooses to continue to push the open standard over/against
Microsoft, free software stands to gain from better implementations
(by the community, or by Adobe if it's feeling generous). If, on the
other hand, Adobe drops SVG, open standards for these applications may
die a quiet death for a decade or so.

OTOH perhaps *Microsoft* is interested in embracing and extending SVG
to crush Adobe? That would be interesting to watch, and possibly
actually bring forward the time when free software and open standards
capture this space.