This week’s big news: the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. Apart from the press release optimism, there’s a real downside to the news. Any student of business will tell you that acquisitions more often than not fail to create any new value.
From the inside, Adobe will have an uphill battle integrating the two companies. While their product offerings at times mirrored each other, they have immensely different corporate cultures. Adobe, the slow and bureaucratic consensus oriented style and Macromedia’s more loose, organic style make the two companies as different as Apple and Microsoft.
From the consumer’s point of view, there’s more bad news. This melting of the two multimedia giants will create a creative arts monopoly. Despite what Microsoft may say, innovation is the enemy of a monopoly, and thus monopolies mush stall innovation to maintain market control.
So where do we go from here? It will be up to small software companies and the Open Source crowd to keep Adobe honest and the applications interesting. I for one will miss the old Macromedia. I think I’ll go home and fire up Dreamweaver 3 just for nostalgia’s sake. Thanks for all the good times!
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April 25th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
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