Allaire and Macromedia to Merge

Someone owes me some money

Submitted by Jeff Howden on January 16, 2001 - 16:40.

I think this is great news for both Allaire and Macromedia. I've felt for a long time that the two companies could do some incredible things together. Now, maybe all of us CF developers can get our dreams of image processing as part of the cf server engine or an easily installed add-on (no, Generator is *not* easy to install).

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Sounds promising

Submitted by mrpatto on January 16, 2001 - 18:36.

I think Dreamweaver integrated with HomeSite could be a great product. No more swapping programs....

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And Ultradev?

Submitted by themadman on January 17, 2001 - 01:20.

Hmmm... so ColdFusion support will be improved in Dreamweaver Ultradev, I guess. I wonder how this affects the app's support for ASP and JSP. Comments, Raymond?

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Love it

Submitted by pedrito on January 17, 2001 - 03:35.

I think it's really good news too. Allaire and Macromedia seem the two most clued in software companies out there. Combined with Allaire's move towards JAVA this all makes for interesting years to come...

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Allaire giving up?

Submitted by MartinB on January 17, 2001 - 04:26.

I think this may be Allaire giving up making an impact on the top end installs - competing with Broadvision, Vignette, Ariba, i2 et al, and down-sizing its ambitions to the mid-end. This could be OK, if the strategy is to go for volume rather than revenue per install, but in that market, they're going directly against ASP. Competing with Microsoft is never going to be fun.

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Homesite vs. Dreamweaver

Submitted by Tijs on January 17, 2001 - 05:43.

I just hope they will keep HS and DW seperate products. The power of Homesite is that it's simple and gives you room to write your own code. An integrated version would probably feature those pesky shrinkwrapped DW scripts making it too tempting to not write your own stuff. It's probably good news for Textpad though...

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Response to ASP query...

Submitted by jedimaster on January 17, 2001 - 10:40.

From the FAQ: Will Macromedia authoring software continue to support other application server solutions?
We support JavaServer Pages(JSP), Active Server Pages (ASP), and ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) in Macromedia UltraDev today, and we intend to continue to support these platforms in the future.

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All ya' need now is a Web server

Submitted by themadman on January 18, 2001 - 23:18.

Macromedia is trying to up the stakes, eh? Like Martin said, competing with Microsoft is not going to be fun. All Macromedia needs to do now is to merge with a company that makes a decent web/application server. This will help it to compete with Microsoft's IIS as well. :)

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App server

Submitted by MartinB on January 19, 2001 - 17:43.

Cold Fusion is the app server they need. And who cares about web servers when you've got Apache? Better to be web server-neutral, as it is somewhat of a commodity, chosen by default with the OS platform.

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Hope Allaire will market Flash better

Submitted by bongotronic on January 19, 2001 - 20:07.

Macromedia has a real coup with Flash, specially since it's plugin is bundled with new browsers. Flash should be to the Web what Adobe Illustrator was to print production. I don't think Macromedia gets this, and have wasted too much focus on thier other products, while Flash is the jewel. Allaire seems to get what web developers from the large to the small can use and how to market this. I hope they will know what the golden egg they have in Flash and will better market it and better leverage both Allaire and the Macromedia graphic products.

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Macromedia, Apache and Unix

Submitted by pixelgeek on January 20, 2001 - 13:23.

If you use Apache or a Unix OS then I would suggest you make your preferences for those products know to Macromedia. The company doesn't have a good track record for supporting either. Their Generator product never shipped for Unix (did it ship with a Solaris version?) and Generator didn't support Apache under Windows. A fact that came back to haunt use after we had received our Generator packages and then had to downgrade our servers to use IIS. I would also suggest making a strong statement to the company about keeping their hands off HS/CF Studio. I have nightmares thinking about them trying to merge either of those products with DreamWeaver or UltraDev.

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Allaire giving up on enterprise solutions cont.

Submitted by MartinB on January 23, 2001 - 07:25.

According to this FAQ answer, Allaire aren't pursuing the enterprise market at all. The thing is, is there a market for Spectra below the enterprise market?

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Don't Understand The Good

Submitted by agraetz on January 24, 2001 - 15:49.

I've never been impressed by Macromedia. I've never had anything bad occur. But something like Flash baffles me. I've seen all of maybe 3 web sites that made use of flash that was effective and productive. Usually it's used on the level of a flaming logo. Yes, they have all sorts of products other than Flash. I just don't see them as having a nice track record of doing all sorts of great stuff for years and years. What I'd really like to know is WHY Macromedia is doing this. If they're buying Allaire simply to diversify their revenues a bit, I don't see a future full of bazllions happy CF servers generating away. Not to say that CF would just fall off the face of the earth. I'm just weary that this move was more about accounting and heding bets than seeing a great product and idea and taking it to the next level.

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Submitted by pixelgeek on January 24, 2001 - 21:38.

I'm just weary that this move was more about accounting and heding bets than seeing a great product and idea and taking it to the next level. I think this is the first acquisition I've seen that makes any sort of sense. Allaire is a great middleware vendor and I think Macromedia sees that quite a few of their customers (at least of their web producets) either already use or are a possible market for Cold Fusion or JRun. That said I don't think that Macromedia is, at a corporate level, run by anything other than a desire to see profits and I've never thought that the people who run Macromedia (as opposed to hte engineers and designers) actually understand what the web is about. They see a dollar sign and thats all. This doesn't make them much different than any other company mind you but I always find it distressing to see great technological solutions being placed in the ahnds of people who only want to make a buck off of it. Maybe I'm jsut being too much of a sentimentalist...

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Correction

Submitted by pixelgeek on January 25, 2001 - 18:08.

I have been lead to believe that there is infact a version of Generator that works with Linux

Mea Culpa

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This is how corporations work

Submitted by MartinB on January 26, 2001 - 06:33.

That said I don't think that Macromedia is, at a corporate level, run by anything other than a desire to see profits and I've never thought that the people who run Macromedia (as opposed to the engineers and designers) actually understand what the web is about. They see a dollar sign and that's all.

Sorry, but that's what corporations are about. They exist to give shareholders a (usually long-term) return on their investments. They don't exist to provide great products and services as such, but to make money. Now to get there, they have to be able (profitably) sell those products and services, and it helps if they offer good value to customers by being good and/or cheap. But that's only a methodology for the main purpose, which is, as I say, profit.

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Shareholders versus users

Submitted by pixelgeek on January 26, 2001 - 13:07.

They exist to give shareholders a (usually long-term) return on their investments.

This is true but the interests of shareholders are quite often (if not always) at cross purposes to the interests of users and developers. Shareholders are not going to want to invest in a software company that delivers maximal value for the end user because typically that means that the use won't need to upgrade. Most software companies exist on the Microsoft model of frequent updates. Shareholders and users also have, I would believe, differing ideas about how much to pay for bug fixes, patches and interim releases.

And I would have to disagree with the idea that investors are looking for long term returns. Perhaps this is something that the stock market will return to but currently the market is looking at short term quarterly returns and not at the long term.

in fact I would go so far as to say that this focus on immediate returns and quarterly profit only exacerbates the problem.

I think that most software companies would be better off staying private and focus on satisfying their customers instead of having to satisfy their shareholders. Take Allaire as a good example of this. Since they went public they have had to craft their development policy towards appealing to their shareholders and the market instead of their users. This is bad enough but I think it becomes even more troubling when you have a market that, for the most part, doesn't understand the technology or the uses for that technology.

Macromedia went through a stage where it was promoting a series of Java Export tools for Director. Why? Because the market was up in arms over Java tools at the time and Java tools on your corporate "checklist" meant a better stock price. None of the developers used the tools. The tools didn't really even work all that well and they caused no end of trouble because clients suddenly started asking for Java apps instead of Director apps even though the Java tools were very weak compared to Director.

Users of the product suffered in order to make shareholders and the market happy.

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Forrester opinion

Submitted by MartinB on January 28, 2001 - 05:29.

Uber-research firm, Forrester Research have released their analysis of the merger. Their summary? "Macromedia And Allaire Create Midmarket Power"

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Share of market or sales of DreamWeaver, GoLive...

Submitted by lucialuz on January 22, 2004 - 02:50.

Share of market or sales of DreamWeaver, GoLive... ??? Does anyone know any kind of information about sales (n

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