[MW Forums]

Adobe Systems Inc.’s agreement to acquire Macromedia for approximately US$3.4 billion will give the company a formidable collection of Web publishing and document management software—and will place it squarely in the path of tools rival Microsoft. more

[osxholungman]

Flash is Web junks, everytime I see Flash sites I just skip it, those bouncing graphics and spining texts does look like high tech stuff 10 years ago, but now nearly everyone and everywhere is using it, and it is a bit waste time and boring.

[Photonerd]

Let's say it together now so everyone can get it through their heads: Microsoft and Adobe are NOT direct competitors, in ANY sense of the word. Microsoft makes all of its money licensing operating systems, development tools and office productivity software, as well as gaming consoles.
Adobe has not ONE product in any of those areas, except perhaps Acrobat, where there is no Windows quivalent anyway. And no, FrontPage does not count as competition for GoLive or Dreamweaver, and no Windows Media does not count as competition for FLASH.
THIS DEAL WAS NOT ABOUT MICROSOFT, so let's dispense with the amateur business analysis because it's not what Macworld is qualified to do. End of story.

[mdawson]

Flash content is like anything else on the Web or in print. Some people produce quality products, many more produce crap. I have come across several Flash-based sites that are designed very well and it says something about the sites author. If a Web author has no sense of style or layout finesse then their site is going to be crap whether its Flash-based, HTML, XML or whatever. Also, all Flash-based sites are not animated and gimmicky. Some people choose to use flash instead of HTML so that others cannot copy and paste their content elsewhere.

[spdorsey]

Photonerd:
You may not realize that Adobe is VERY aggressively pushing Acrobat and other content solutions in the corporate marketplace. Adobe is offering huge document management solutions (on a worldwide scale) for fortune 500 firms and wide deployment corporations. I didn't realize this until a friend was hired as part of their sales force in Germany. Adobe is VERY serious about this.
Adobe knows that they own the graphics market, and I think they are respecting the fact that they have the power in that arena. But they know that the real money is in the large scale corporate marketplace. Acrobat is not your father's PDF maker anymore. It's not just for Illustrator format alternatives, or for exporting your InDesign document to a printer. It contains some amazing tools for document generation, organization, maintenance, archiving, and distribution.
I don't use any of the deployment features, I'm a designer. But I was surprised to hear about just how big Acrobat really is.
--------------------------S

[Steve_S]

In reply to:

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You may not realize that Adobe is VERY aggressively pushing Acrobat and other content solutions in the corporate marketplace. Adobe is offering huge document management solutions (on a worldwide scale) for fortune 500 firms and wide deployment corporations. I didn't realize this until a friend was hired as part of their sales force in Germany. Adobe is VERY serious about this.

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Yes, I have to agree. Document management is a big deal, and it's something big corporations are starting to embrace. Microsoft knows this and obviously wants a piece of it. Adobe has made acquisitions for things like JETFORMS, etc. to help buy their way into the market. This market is Adobe's to lose now. I can't see Microsoft offering serious competition here anytime soon, though I'm sure they'll try.
Steve

[leicaman]

Adobe can't win this war without Apple. If they are going to take on the keeper of the OS, then they have to get the main alternative platform in graphics and design to work with them. Where is parity with Acrobat Pro? Where is FrameMaker for OS X?
If they don't, then they risk not only alienating the best platform for such work (OS X), but offending the one they have left, and on which they are dependent (Windows).
With Longhorn holding THE main alternative set of technologies, how could they compete without a trump card? They would be stuck in the middle. How can they possibly win in such circumstances? They can't.
Adobe needs a coalition of the willing to take on Sadaam Gates, his minister of disinformation Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf Allchin, and his vapor WMFUDs Avalon and Longhorn. /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[leicaman]

Photonerd,
Microsoft is coming up with an alternative to PDF. To creating business forms. If you think there is no competition between Adobe and Microsoft on this front, then you're not paying attention to the direction Adobe has been going for the past few years - INTO THE ENTERPRISE!

[bastion]

In reply to:

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I can't see Microsoft offering serious competition here anytime soon, though I'm sure they'll try.

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Microsoft becomes serious competition as soon as there's speculation that they may offer a product. (In fact, sometimes they lose momentum after a product release, when a good chunk of the market finds that the product they were waiting for doesn't live up to expectations.)

[Photonerd]

Look folks, I understand MS would love to supplant PDF but a) it's not going to happen because PDF is already entrenched in the Windows market and b) it's a document format. It's not an operating system or a spreadsheet or C environment or a gaming console. MS and Adobe, while they may compete for niche-like things such as PDF, do not compete in the same marketspace.
Apple competes with MS, Linux competes with MS, Metrowerks competes with MS, IBM and a host of others. But Adobe does not (not in the context MW seems to imply to make their article seem exciting / interesting).
Adobe's primary competitor just got acquired, and what's left is Corel, Apple and a very few others. For several of their products, Adobe has no competition. You have to look at what brings a company money before you can name the competitors, guys, and MS is not one of them generally.
Competing over PDF is not the same thing as Adobe and MS being direct competitors, which is what Macworld and the publications they syndicate from seem to be implying. That is simply not correct / is a skewed view of what these two companies are all about. The day MS starts making design software or other creative products aimed at the high end of the market, or the day Adobe starts making office suites and operating systems, is the day they start competing in earnest.

[deemery]

The ability to do computer-based forms is something that is needed for both business internal and consumer uses. Consider how many forms you fill out in a year...
The real issue is whether we get platform-independent forms, or whether (as has happened with the forms packages I know about) the software runs on one platform (i.e. Windoze) only.
dave

[Uncle_Deercamp]

I love the little comment about how they have "a lot" of competition. Trying to avoid an anti-trust suit, hmmmm?

[lhudd]

Flash is only distracting when it's used stupidly. You want to see some brilliant usage of Flash, check out www.homestarrunner.com some time. Make sure to check out the "sb emails" section, it's one of my favorites.
A big pet peeve of mine is the "splash" website that makes you watch some stupid Flash (or other) animation before you can get to the information you're looking for. It's very poor web design. Fortunately, you'll notice the number of sites employing this type of design has dropped dramatically in recent years. Flash is very powerful and very advantageous when used properly. A friend and I are thinking about putting together a web site of video clips and we're going to use flash to keep people from stealing and redistributing the clips. I've taken defensive driving online where the "videos" you watch are in flash so, take note of thiss, you can view the course regardless of what platform you're on. Other Defensive driving sites use WMP codec's that OS-X doesn't support.
Flash is a great product... the users of it just need to know when to exercise control of their urges to overuse it.

[lhudd]

I have to agree. Even in its most recent "professional" form, Acrobat leaves a LOT to be desired in the creation of fillable forms. I know how to do it, but damn its clunky. I really needs to become streamlined. However, because nobody is driving Adobe from behind, there's little motivation for them to fix it. I welcome competition from MS in this area... maybe it will force Adobe to address some of their horrible shortcomings. They keep upgrading Acrobat to new versions but they don't really give us more features or improve the features already in place. The most recent acrobat upgrades mainly fix things (e.g. Safari plug-in capability, OS-X native functionality, etc) that they should have done as free updates to old versions. Furthermore, Acrobat professional 6 was so oversized and bloated, they had to make it smaller and more quickly launchable in version 7. I quit using acrobat altogether because I got tired of waiting for it to load. And I'm using a DP G5!