Enough Whining About the Adobe-Macromedia Merger

If Adobe had­n’t bought Macromedia, Microsoft prob­a­bly would have, and then there would have been no stop­ping Bill and com­pa­ny. The impli­ca­tions of Microsoft com­plete­ly dom­i­nat­ing epaper/eforms and mobile con­tent pub­lish­ing would be far reach­ing and mon­u­men­tal. For one, an even larg­er Microsoft monop­oly would severe­ly hin­der Apple’s Holy Grail aspi­ra­tions of get­ting its oper­at­ing sys­tem into the enter­prise (although Apple is unhap­py about the Adobe-Macromedia merg­er for oth­er reasons).

So, let Jon Gruber whine about the loss of Macromedia’s inde­pen­dence. It would have hap­pened regard­less. Macromedia was in pos­ses­sion of tech­nolo­gies too valu­able to be ignored, tech­nolo­gies that will prove crit­i­cal to the plan­et’s move toward elec­tron­ic doc­u­ments and the merg­er of broad­cast tele­vi­sion and the Internet. Those who want to own that mar­ket could not let Macromedia’s tech­nolo­gies remain out there, wait­ing to be used against them. It was inevitable that some­one would buy­out Macromedia. The only ques­tions remain­ing were who, and whether they would use the tech­nolo­gies or kill them so no one else could.

I’m a fan of the Warnock and Geschke Adobe much more so than the Chizen Adobe, but it’s still Adobe. If it’s a choice between Adobe and Microsoft to con­trol the epa­per and dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing tools of the future, I’ll root for Adobe with­out fail. Ultimately, Macromedia would have been bought by some­one, and there were only three play­ers inter­est­ed enough, and with the means, of doing so: Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe.

Had it been Apple, Microsoft would still win in the end. OS X is nowhere near ready to be an enter­prise desk­top, so Apple sim­ply could­n’t pen­e­trate the mar­kets that count when it comes to com­pet­ing with Microsoft on epa­per (and, again, mobile con­tent pub­lish­ing). Nor does Apple have the pre-existing tech­nol­o­gy to suc­cess­ful­ly mar­ry to Macromedia’s to make a good use of such an acqui­si­tion. Apple would have made stel­lar desk­top appli­ca­tions, but that would be the fur­thest they could reach. Even more impor­tant­ly, Apple’s pri­ma­ry con­cern is sell­ing its com­put­er hard­ware. Everything they do–OS X, iTunes, iPod–is built around lever­ag­ing the Mac. And, they pro­mote it sole­ly as a lifestyle brand com­put­er. Enterprises don’t care about lifestyle brands; they care about pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, which is Microsoft’s, not Apple’s, brand image. Make no mis­take: Apple is square­ly focused on pen­e­trat­ing and tak­ing over the enter­prise, but they need to work up to that by keep­ing their design mar­ket, recap­tur­ing the edu­ca­tion mar­ket, and estab­lish­ing a new base among home users. Once that’s done, they’ll move upward through SOHO, small- to medium-sized busi­ness­es, and then into enterprise.

Were Microsoft the pur­chas­er of Macromedia, it would have con­vert­ed all the mar­kets of ColdFusion- and Flash-based tech­nolo­gies into Metro using amal­ga­ma­tions of Flash and Sparkle and Dreamweaver and FrontPage to extend the reach of Office. For the next 10–15 years, Microsoft would have a stran­gle hold on epaper–long enough to choke the life out of Adobe and send Apple and Linux back to micro­scop­ic marketshares.

Adobe was the only log­i­cal choice for buy­ing Macromedia–that is, unless you favor a Microsoft-controlled world more monopolystic and dra­con­ian than your cur­rent office.

As far as the lack of com­pe­ti­tion argu­ment, that doesn’t hold water either. Adobe has held almost total mar­ket dom­i­nance with Photoshop, AfterEffects, FrameMaker, and Acrobat for years with­out slip­ping. At the same time, they’ve watched com­pe­ti­tion like Quark, Microsoft, Corel, and Apple (most­ly under John Sculley) fall into the trap of king of the hill com­pla­cen­cy only to be blind­sided by hun­gri­er, more agile com­peti­tors. Bruce Chizen is not an idiot, nor is he lazy. He knows what hap­pens when mar­ket lead­ers become com­pla­cent, how easy it is to be shot dead when they stand in one place too long, which is why he makes sure Adobe is a con­stant­ly mov­ing target.