Peter Tilbrook wrote: > I wonder what the Allaire veterans at Macromedia are thinking (there must be > more than a few still left) - or even what Jeremy and JJ Allaire make of it > - their humble company now changing hads twice. As someone who experienced the last merger from the inside, there's a few factors I think are interesting.
The obvious factor is the product side. From this angle, the merger looks pretty good IMHO. There could be some great stuff arising from bringing the PDF and CF platforms together for example. Where there's product overlap, there's also a clear market leader. So I'd expect to see some merging of the best features from the 'underdogs' into the market leaders and then one product to remain. Don't hold your breath for new versions of Freehand or GoLive any time soon. The product suite possibilities are pretty tempting. Imagine a Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, CF bundle. Aside from products, I think the best possibility from this merger is the 'Enterprise' factor. Allaire and Macromedia have never really made it in the enterprise space. A lot of this comes down to size - you need a lot of support and consulting muscle to be taken seriously by the big end of town. Adobe has that capability now for their document workflow products. It'd be great to see the MM server products getting similar support. Whether that happens comes down to the last factor - people and culture. This is the big unknown really. Macromedia laid off pretty much all of the Allaire consultants in the first year after the merger. At the time, it was pretty much put down to the fact that MM was a "box pusher" with little understanding for the needs of customers in the enterprise space. I think Adobe 'gets' that market. Let's just hope they're not miopic elsewhere. It'll be interesting to see what emerges. T. --- You are currently subscribed to cfaussie as: [email protected] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Aussie Macromedia Developers: http://lists.daemon.com.au/
