Sorry to bring the tech world onto this blog, as it is something I go out of my way to avoid… but this one is interesting enough to me to mention.

Today, Adobe bought Macromedia (my previous employer) for $3.4 billion in stock. While a few years ago this would have been a big deal, with Adobe as the stodgy, conservative, button-down company buying the pierced, tattooed upstart Macromedia punks, that is all outdated. After dot-com, Macromedia became less and less interesting and more and more corporate in its hiring and culture.

So, sadly, the companies are more of a cultural fit now than they ever should have become. Adobe has only created one or two things (PhotoShop, PDF), same with Macromedia (Dreamweaver and Flash), and stuck with them. They bought the rest, and created "new" products that mainly take existing products and rewrap them for new audiences (Contribute is Dreamweaver for dummies, PhotoShop Elements is a bland subset of PhotoShop for digital camera people).

That Macromedia has no blog software, and neither owns the market share for image editing/fixing/management software for digital camera users is telling.

Despite the "join forces" language that will be used by Macromedia, this is a total acquisition by Adobe, the actual wordage they are using to describe it in their materials, which clearly shows that they are running the show here.

In a nutshell, despite all of the happy talk that is likely being pumped into the air over on Townsend Street, this makes not working there even easier, knowing my days would have been numbered anyway (based on my experience with past acquisitions). Although, a big ol’ severance package would have been nice.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 18th, 2005 at 8:05 am and is filed under diary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.