Richard’s Educational Technology Blog

The plans for Adobe to acquire Macromedia have some potentially huge impacts on the design industry. The transaction, valued at approximately $3.4 billion, combines the two largest developers of multimedia software in the world. The danger of the merger is that Adobe sheds itself of its only true competitor (scary thoughts of another Microsoft come to mind). However, there are some major benefits we can expect to see from this change as well - here are some examples…

More Stability
Since Adobe’s software is consistently more stable than Marcomedia’s, once the Adobe engineers get a hold of Marcomedia’s products we can expect to see many bug fixes.

Improved Usability
When it comes to insuring great usability in their products, Adobe ranks right up there with Apple. Macromedia, on the other hand, has not always been as successful (as products such as Flash and Dreamweaver have proven). Adobe’s influence on Macromedia’s products is sure to produce improved usability.

A Killer Web Authoring Application
For years designers have said that they wish they could take the best features of Adobe GoLive (such as the user interface and multimedia tools) and combine them with the site management and template tools from Macromedia Dreamweaver. Now, it looks like the engineers at Adobe will do it for them! As soon as this happens, the new product will be THE industry standard for web development.

This is an exciting time in the design industry! Combine Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia and Apple’s release of Tiger and their Production Suite, and we begin to see some of the most significant software advances that we’ve seen in years.

> For more information, visit Adobe Systems and Macromedia.

> For more information on Adobe’s aquisition of Macromedia, visit Google News.