Apple, buy Macromedia NOW!
Apple has some $5-6bn in cash lying around. For around $2-3bn, they could buy out Macromedia and use their products (Freehand, Flash, Director, HTML suite) as the basis of future dtp and media creation products.
Macromedia is seemingly in bad shape - they lack innovation and are loosing ground against Adobe and others. Their products get more and more Windows-centric (ugly UI), but they still have interesting stuff to offer - in areas, where Apple has nothing.
Just think about Freehand integration with iWork or QuickTime as the Flash-plugin on Windows...
Macromedia is seemingly in bad shape - they lack innovation and are loosing ground against Adobe and others. Their products get more and more Windows-centric (ugly UI), but they still have interesting stuff to offer - in areas, where Apple has nothing.
Just think about Freehand integration with iWork or QuickTime as the Flash-plugin on Windows...
Comments
DTP used to be cool but now many are the "Old Hands" of computing clutching feverishly on their Quark 4 with Xtensions.
The money is going to be Digital Lifestyle and getting the home networked and utilizing subscription services. 6 billion isn't a lot here but Apple could make some moves.
QuickTime includes Flash, so any QT app can become a Flash authoring environment (vis. Keynote).
Now that Apple is providing an incredibly rich set of frameworks in their OS, I see an entire class of applications retreating into niches. If Macromedia has become more Windows-centric, it might be because they saw the writing on the wall.
Originally posted by hmurchison
But what's the growth potential for web/authoring tools? Seems pretty small since the market is barely leaving room for both Adobe and Macromedia to survive.
This is the pro market. But what about consumers? What are your choices for content creation at home?
The iLife-suite covers the digital image and video area, and for a very reasonable price you can buy iWork to serve your text processing and presentation needs. GarageBand for the aspiring musicians.
But what about drawing, sketching and web publishing? Freehand, Golive, Dreamweaver and Illustrator are too expensive. Buy them and split them up into a professional line and a consumer line.
Besides, as much as I hate Flash - it is still hot as a content distribution format. Owning it allows you to influence its future.
Why is Flash on OS X like 1% of the speed it is on Windows, in every single browser? I'm on a PBG4 867mhz with 640 RAM and 10.3.7, and it's slow with nothing else running.
Originally posted by Aquatic
Why is Flash on OS X like 1% of the speed it is on Windows, in every single browser?
Because it is a crappy port from the System 8.x times. There is nothing inherently wrong in porting code from 7/8/9 over to X, but you have to do a lot of profiling and optimizing (see Photoshop or QuickTime). The windows-version quite likely uses DirectX heavily and can perform quite good, whereas the Mac-version does not leverage CoreFoundation and Quartz calls directly.
Macromedia has no real incentive to invest heavily in the Mac-version, so it might stay crappy for years to come.
Originally posted by Smircle
Macromedia is seemingly in bad shape - they lack innovation and are loosing ground against Adobe and others. Their products get more and more Windows-centric (ugly UI), but they still have interesting stuff to offer - in areas, where Apple has nothing.
How do you figure that Macromedia is in bad shape?
They are doing great with Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Fireworks MX 2004. The newest addition to their family of software is Contribute 3 and it is a very innovative piece of software.
And their development team is working on the new suite of software which will include Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and others.
The next big thing from Macromedia is the new ColdFusion codenamed Blackstone.
I just don't see how they are struggling.