Enough Whining About the Adobe-Macromedia Merger

Yes, Adobe’s near total lack of viable Web prod­ucts was a small fac­tor, but the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tor for the acqui­si­tion was Microsoft’s Metro e‑paper sys­tem. With Acrobat, PDF, eForms, and the serv­er solu­tions based on them, Adobe dom­i­nates the bur­geon­ing elec­tron­ic paper mar­ket at the enter­prise and gov­ern­ment lev­els. Microsoft, with its Windows oper­at­ing sys­tem and Office suite, holds an undis­put­ed monop­oly on enter­prise and gov­ern­ment desk­top work­sta­tions. Any oth­er com­pa­ny or prod­uct line becom­ing just as ubiq­ui­tous in these mar­kets threat­ens to top­ple Microsoft’s empire.

With Linux and OS X becom­ing stronger and more business-friendly, and with alter­na­tive word proces­sors and spread­sheet appli­ca­tions just begin­ning to gain accep­tance, Microsoft needs to remain the sole ven­dor in as many enter­prise areas as pos­si­ble just to lever­age the con­tin­ued prof­itabil­i­ty of its exist­ing prod­ucts (Windows, Office, etc.). Therefore, the suc­cess of Metro is cru­cial to Microsoft’s future. Remember: Adobe’s PDF for­mat is platform-independent, and it would take lit­tle effort for Adobe to tran­si­tion its enter­prise prod­uct line to run just as well on Linux or OS X sys­tems as they do on Windows.

Take the IRS, for whom Adobe orig­i­nal­ly built their eform serv­er, LiveCycle Policy Server. If the IRS stays with PDF and Adobe prod­ucts, that is a major set of tech­nolo­gies and sys­tems not specif­i­cal­ly requir­ing Windows; if the IRS want­ed to change it’s oper­at­ing sys­tems, Adobe, not hav­ing a stake in any oper­at­ing sys­tem suc­cess, could rapid­ly and eas­i­ly deliv­er solu­tions to a new plat­form. Although not like­ly for a long time to come, it is pos­si­ble that, down the road 10 years or so, Linux or OS X could become attrac­tive to the IRS and oth­er enterprise- or government-level cus­tomers. The few­er Windows-centric sys­tems and solu­tions employed at such lev­els, the stronger the temp­ta­tion to walk away from Microsoft’s oper­at­ing sys­tem. What gov­ern­ment agency wouldn’t be inter­est­ed in a virus-free, Mac-based office if Macs were enterprise-ready?

With the epa­per cold war heat­ing up, Adobe knew Microsoft had one crit­i­cal ele­ment of the enter­prise infra­struc­ture that Adobe did­n’t: Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) with .NET and an Access backend.

Macromedia, on the oth­er hand, already owned ColdFusion, the Web’s most wide­ly used data­base con­nec­tiv­i­ty solu­tion and dynam­ic con­tent back­end (MySQL with PHP is the open source alter­na­tive, but enter­prise can’t bank on open source). Coldfusion and IIS/.NET are neck and neck in terms of installed user base, and, if Adobe is going to make good on its promise of gen­uine dynam­ic PDF con­tent, they need ColdFusion (and a healthy dose of the under­ly­ing Flash Paper tech­nol­o­gy). Without it, Microsoft would crush the PDF dom­i­nan­cy at the enter­prise, which, of course, would trick­le down through medium-sized busi­ness­es, SOHO, and ulti­mate­ly consumers–though none of those groups are as impor­tant as the enter­prise to the future prof­itabil­i­ty of either Microsoft or Adobe.

The deci­sion to pur­chase Macromedia was moti­vat­ed by ColdFusion and Flash. Flex, Breeze, and the oth­er prod­ucts were small­er but also impor­tant con­sid­er­a­tions because, togeth­er with Acrobat, InDesign, LiveCycle Designer, Dreamweaver, and a few prod­ucts yet to be revealed, they’ll become the fron­tend of the PDF/ColdFusion/LiveCycle epaper/eforms platform.

Where Microsoft is try­ing to lever­age Office as its Metro fron­tend, Adobe has a wider base and more scal­able tools already on hand to form its fron­tend. Everyone uses Office, but every­one also uses Acrobat. More impor­tant­ly, every­one involved with the enter­prise can already read PDFs through the free Adobe Reader. Earth’s major gov­ern­ments have already stan­dard­ized on PDF and Adobe Reader. Adobe already owns the doc­u­ment view­ing side of the equa­tion. Microsoft, on the oth­er hand, failed in its pri­or attempt to beat out Reader with it’s short-lived Microsoft Word Viewer. Now they’ll try it again with Metro and a free view­er (built into Windows Vista and Internet Explorer 7), but they face two great chal­lenges: First, Adobe does­n’t have to do any­thing to pro­mote PDF and Reader, it’s already there on every desk­top (again, those around the enter­prise). The enter­prise knows PDF, knows how to read them, and how to make them–even from with­in Office. Microsoft will have to not only con­vince the enter­prise that they can make bet­ter doc­u­ments eas­i­er with Metro, but also con­vince the whole mar­ket to begin using Metro read­er. Remember: Large cor­po­ra­tions take years before they upgrade oper­at­ing sys­tems, so they won’t have Metro thrust upon them in the form of Windows Vista for approx­i­mate­ly 1–5 years after ini­tial release.

The key advan­tage Microsoft had in that area was their IIS serv­er and .NET and Access data­bas­es. With PDF, Flash, and ColdFusion under a sin­gle roof, Microsoft’s advan­tage has all but evap­o­rat­ed. After pur­chas­ing Macromedia, Adobe has the gen­uine poten­tial of estab­lish­ing an unchal­lenged epa­per empire.

Oh, and let’s not for­get that the enterprise–and espe­cial­ly governments–love standards-compliancy. PDF is already a stan­dard, and both PDF and ColdFusion are XML-compliant with­out the non-standard fla­vor­ings that keep Microsoft prod­ucts pro­pri­etary and profitable.

Adobe’s choice to pur­chase Macromedia had noth­ing what­so­ev­er to do with acquir­ing the com­pe­ti­tion that was killing GoLive and threat­en­ing AfterEffects (and had already killed LiveMotion). In fact, it had noth­ing to do with the appli­ca­tions pro­duced by either company’s cre­ative pro busi­ness unit. It was about keep­ing Adobe in the epa­per busi­ness, and beat­ing Microsoft to the mobile con­tent pub­lish­ing mar­ket (a dis­cus­sion for anoth­er time).

If Adobe had­n’t bought Macromedia… (Continued on Next Page)