Good or Bad: Adobefication

I have always been a great advocate of the Macromedia range of products, in particular Flash and Dreamweaver. Macromedia have consistently produced sensibly priced, high quality user friendly products that are powerful yet easy to pick up.

On the other hand I have never been a fan of Adobe products, I have always found them over priced and their user interfaces clumsy, unintuitave and overly complicated.

So now what? Where does the Adobe / Macromedia "merger" (read takeover) leave users? It is obvious from the recent changes to the Macromedia website who the dominant party is. Many of the users on the "Adobe formerly Macromedia" Team Macromedia forums have expressed similar concerns, such as the future for Macromedia products that conflict directly with existing Abobe products, for instance Macromedia Freehand and Adobe Illustrator. I know which product I think is superior, but in cases like this it's not the end user that matters, it's "brand identity" and "rationalization". Some have suggested that any rationalization will lead simply to any such products being sold of to other interested parties. I'm afraid I don't see this happening. For all Adobe are making all the right noises at the moment about continued support and product development I can't see any rational in selling off what are competing products to a competitor, it just makes no sense. Ultimately I see such products being shelved or, even worse, core elements of the Macromedia product being incorporated into the main Adobe product to create a single Adobeised hybrid product.

Personally I would have liked to see Adobe act as an umbrella company, maintaining the Macromedia brand. Now this may be a generalization, but I think, and this seems to be confirmed by opinion on the forums, that Macromedia users are not the same as Adobe users they belong to different markets and, more importantly, have a different cultural mindset. The Macromedia website was(and for the time being remains) a user driven, community based environment where users could feel they actually made a difference and that the company Macromedia listened to them directly. It was warm and friendly, something that has been lost following the recent Adobe brand "makeover".

Whenever any large company seeks to remove a competitor via the acquisition route the only people to suffer are the customers. I have just one thing left to say directly to Adobe. Guys, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.