Adobe += Macromedia;

Macromedia are now officially owned by Adobe, the aquisition was completed on Saturday and now their flag is flying on the Macromedia Homepage which has changed slightly here and there to get website visitors into the huge transition that lies ahead (Im glad im not the person responsible for the re-branding - the poor soul!).

Adobe have launched a new web product bundle to co-incide with the announcement, which includes Studio 8 Products.

The major concern at present for me and various others developers is the badly worded FAQ that kind of suggests that Adobe intend to bundle Flash Player and Adobe Reader together as one… apparently, and hopefully that is not the case, but i wouldn’t put it past them. What a disaster that would be, Flash Player only succeeded because of its small footprint, Adobe Reader is a good 20 mb download which would make Flash Player bigger than Shockwave Player to download - which we all know didnt reach the masses quite like Flash, simply because it was bloatware - something that Adobe have worryingly mastered down to a fine art.

I must admit as a developer im not very familiar with Adobe (Although i am presently learning Adobe After Effects), the only thing i know for sure about them is that i hear they are not very good at working/communicating with their community/customers (Although they did start blogging not so long ago), their beta programs are elitist, their website kind of sucks to say their products are primarily for visual thinking people (what’s going to happen to DevNet and Macromedia Forums) and they have alot of learning to do when it comes to making tools for developers.

Hopefully Macromedia Developer Relations as we know them (Mike Chambers, Danny Dura, Christian Cantrell at al) won’t be over-shadowed by the Adobe regime and that Macromedia Labs and the new open initiative/customer driven product development cycles dont die an early death (How cool would it be to see public alphas of Photoshop and After Effects up there?), and lets hope MXNA doesnt become a censored AXNA.

All in all im hoping that good things will come from this aquisition and that Macromedia can teach Adobe a thing or two about the web, dealing with customers, keeping the filesizes down and working with developers not designers.

Exciting times? Im not too sure yet, it’s too early to tell. But still, farewell to Macromedia and welcome Adobe - we are watching you very closely

Hopefully your watching us too!