Yesterday, I woke up to the news of Adobe's buyout of Macromedia and I think it marks the beginning of a new era of documents. The trend of information medium is clear. Years ago, people communicated through text based bulletin boards thru their dial up. Then the invention of internet and html allowed everyone to experience a brochure style presentation with all the perks like color but that was not enough. Today, what once could only be done by an application can now be done on a website. Programmers and web developers alike are replacing the term
'website' with the more appropriate term
'web application'. But how have our documents changed over the years? It hasn't - at least not until recently. Documents are the pen and paper of the digital world and for the most part, software has only helped addressed the difficulty and tediousness of creating and distributing a similar document by hand. Microsoft attempted to push this definition with the release of Office 2003 and their development kit allowing someone, for example, to create an excel document that pulls data from a web server and dynamically generate graphs. The definition of documents is changing and Adobe recognizes this. Documents are no longer static. They are becoming more interactive and Adobe's need to meet these challenges are increasingly important. What better solution then to buy a company who already has a strong foundation on the web with their flash platform and specializes in animation and graphics? I'm sure Adobe's decision to purchase Macromedia has caught many people off guard but in the end, I think we will see it as Adobe's push to keep up with the changing definition of 'document' or better yet, a document application.
On the otherhand, Mack Male has written an interesting
post regarding how this maybe the end of Adobe/Macromedia due to the threat of Microsoft. While I think many of his points are valid and the possibility of Microsoft to perceive this bigger blimp on the radar as a threat is true, I still believe Adobe's move is wise. A lack of change for any company would be the biggest threat of all and fortunately, Adobe's purchase has given them a great leap forward in the evolution of documents.
Tags: adobe software macromedia microsoft