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May 19, 2006
Burke on Gruber
Burke on Gruber: Pariah S. Burke looks back at John Gruber's "Fish Rots From The Head" essay, a year after the Adobe/Macromedia acquisition was announced. He points out that the deal was less about past technologies than future technologies: "Adobe's choice to purchase Macromedia had nothing whatsoever to do with acquiring the competition that was killing GoLive and threatening AfterEffects (and had already killed LiveMotion). In fact, it had nothing to do with the applications produced by either company's creative pro business unit. It was about keeping Adobe in the epaper business, and beating Microsoft to the mobile content publishing market (a discussion for another time)." There's also the declarative interfaces work (Flex), the business productivity work (Acrobat + Breeze), and the whole video world too... the opportunities to do new work were acknowledged as a prime motivator from the start.
Posted by JohnDowdell at May 19, 2006 03:24 PM
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Comments
Wow! Great link! Thanks jd.
Minor note, about the quoted statement "threatening AfterEffects". Maybe I am missing something but does Flash now, or will it ever compete with After Effects? I personally do not think so. If you are doing film or broadcast titling, motion graphics or special effects you are not going to be using Flash. And if you are generating interactive content to be delivered over the web, you are not going to be using After Effects.
I know cases where Flash and After Effects are complementary. But scant few cases where they compete.
Might Mike Downey and Steve Kilisky be interested in backing me up on this?
Anyhow, other than that I do find Pariah's piece very though provoking.
Posted by: Greg H at May 19, 2006 05:53 PM
Glad you found it useful, Greg... thanks for the word.
For AfterEffects & Flash I'd go along with you... I've already seen a couple of public demos of the tools working together better, and see a big buzz internally in the whole video/swf area... I think Pariah may have been speaking more there of the perceptions some people may have had back then, though.
(btw, I still appreciate John Gruber's 2005 essay, myself... I rarely agree with everything anyone else writes, but I do want to see how other people see the situation too.)
Posted by: John Dowdell at May 19, 2006 08:39 PM
Supporting some of the observations Pariah has in the article linked to above, the following link is to an article by Joe Wilcox that comments on today's news about Adobe & Microsoft butting heads (this time over PDF):
www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/015754.html
Also supporting Pariah's observations, last November Joe Wilcox wrote:
Target Adobe. I swear that Microsoft executives have painted a giant bullseye on Adobe. Long ago, I cautioned that Adobe and Microsoft were on collision course in the enterprise.
www.microsoftmonitor.com/archives/012065.html
Posted by: Greg H at June 2, 2006 04:41 PM