Adobe acquires Macromedia – Flash-crap days at an end?
Here’s hoping, anyway. I’ve hated working inside the Flash development environment since way back when v4 was the hottest thing on the web. Even if the only thing that the public gets out of this acquisition is a thorough cleanup of Flash’s interface and some real performance improvements with that mule of a plugin (because Macromedia themselves certainly haven’t been delivering), I figure that’d be worth the whole US$3.4 billion.
I’m assuming there’s going to be a lot of talk online about an impending monopoly by Adobe, although apart from Flash itself I can’t actually see any markets where Macromedia truly dominates.
… Ok, that’s a lie and I really just don’t want to admit it, but if you trust corporate statistics, Dreamweaver supposedly accounts for about 95% of the professional web designer market. (Take that one with a grain of salt though, because I couldn’t find the original article online, just a bunch of stuff that refer to it.)
And the reason why I don’t want to admit it is because I believe that Dreamweaver is partially (and by that I mean, 95%) responsible for making the web a flashy, glittering, superficial kind of place where the emphasis is on how cool your site looks or what script you ripped to do that cool alpha-based rollover, and not on how effective your site actually is, or how well it allows your users to access its content. You know, kinda like the movie industry.
That’s why folks like 37Signals are my personal heroes, because it’s the useability experts that put the science back into web-design, and actually care about how far to the left or right you’re placing that SUBMIT button, or how many errors your form-validator can catch client-side. (As opposed to folks like say, Eric Jordan, who led a meritricious revolution comprised of salivating, ADD-stricken rookie designers, who all subscribed to the notion that the only way to design a button is to have it blink six billion times per second when the cursor hovers over it.)
Which is why there’s no love lost between me and any of Macromedia’s various harpies. (Adobe is slightly better in my opinion because Photoshop is the only irreplaceable application in any graphic designer’s arsenal. There’s no arguing with the very best, I guess.)
So yeah, I am actually glad that Macromedia’s being taken over, and will continue to hope that all this may eventually result in an intarweb that doesn’t just look nice, but actually works right … at least most of the time.
I was surprised to discover (by way of HF member pinkstar) that there was going to be a 
