Half Your Toolbox is Gone
If you haven’t reviewed Darrel’s list of open source applications for designers, now is probably a good time. Adobe just bought Macromedia for $3.4 billion.
Macromedia’s and Adobe’s separate suites were OK offerings. The best part of both their suites was that an alternative existed. Now together, perhaps we’ll get the best of both; Photoshop with Firework’s compression engine and Illustrator with support for multiple pages. That said, the retail price of the resulting suite probably won’t change. Plus, Adobe now has a monopoly on creative software – with no long-term incentive to innovate.
The winners in this deal may not actually be Adobe or Macromedia, but rather:
- Corel, who has a huge opportunity to build an alternative suite for the Macintosh
- the open-source projects Darrel mentions, who have the potential to build more innovative, standards compliant, and passionate customers for a fraction of the Adobe Suite’s $1,000/license.
John Gruber has a great analysis of the merger at Daring Fireball
3 Comments
3.4 *billion* and they didn’t have a few bucks laying around to fix the numerous bugs in their latest MX Suite? Feh.
I’m rooting for the underdogs here. Corel (partly because they’re canadian, and partly because they snatched up MN’s own PainShop Pro recently) and the open source products.
Adobe owns the world now?
without competition we will never see fixes to bugs…
I hope open source steps up, or soemthing esle happens to keep the competitive edge alive or Adobe might go the way Quark and forget about the rest of us.
Much thanks to Darrel for the links to the open source products. Since I’m currently working on more print work than web, Adobe has already monopolized my workflow to some degree (except for InDesign, as I still favor Quark), even before the buy-out. For print designers this will probably be much more transparent (seems like Photoshop continually improved without any serious competition), but comments I’ve heard from developers usually mention that Adobe’s limited web/interactive products left plenty to be desired. So hopefully this leads to improvements on that front, and not the reverse effect, where Macromedia’s products get dumbed-down. In general, I’m not a fan of monopolies, so I’ll be keeping my eye on the third-party and open-source products (or now is the term “second-party” more appropriate?)