infobong.com

It's about time I sounded off on the Adobe-Macromedia merger, considering the impact it may have on my work. Jason Kottke has done a wonderful job rounding up what influential bloggers have to say about the merger, but he doesn't include Dan Gillmor's post, which pretty much echoes my initial reaction.

Another thing I thought of when I first learned of the merger was Adobe's intellectual property lawsuit against Macromedia in 2000 over a tabbed-palette interface design. After the settlement, Macromedia had to drastically redesign the interface for most of their product line, which, for people who don't use digital production tools, may sound inconsequential, but has created a variety a of headaches for me. Even between Studio MX and Studio MX 2004 the interfaces are different enough to cause confusion for me and my TA. For example, the Actions palette in Flash, which was once rather intuitive, is very difficult for new users to understand. Scripting is hard enough for lower-division RTF students to understand, and a wonky interface doesn't help much. At least this merger may bring improved interfaces to Flash and Dreamweaver.

I haven't seen this mentioned elsewhere - perhaps its the perspective of a budding historian of technology - but in class yesterday I compared this to the Adobe-Aldus "Aldobe" merger in 1994, which certainly shook up the desktop-publishing world, but times change, as well, and the demands of users change; note how that story doesn't even mention Photoshop, which is certainly Adobe's most well-known product today.