Little fish eaten by big fish eaten by bigger fish

The biggest technology/business news of the week would be the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe. These two ferocious competitors fought for the market on web development tools and other related products.

Adobe is most popular in its Photoshop product which to me is the most dominating and most powerful graphic software as well as the industry standard portable data format Adobe Acrobat application. Meanwhile, the San Francisco-based Macromedia is riding the crest on its dominating Flash web development tool.

Going back to history,Macromedia built a strong foundation by acquiring relatively smaller companies such as Allaire which built Cold Fusion and JRun; and FutureWave -- the makers of FutureFlash -- and renamed the product to Macromedia Flash.

And while Macromedia gained some success (read: popularity) in its web authoring products like Dreamweaver and Flash, Adobe's GoLive (acquired from German website editing software firm) and PageMill did not thrive well in an era when free authoring tools were dispersed through the Internet (I remember switching between Coffeecup shareware and a software with a name containing "dog", ocassionally downloading from www.shareware.com, tucows.com and download.com). Adobe did try to compete against Flash but ended up failing. Adobe's trademark expensive products did not help,obviously. If you can't beat them, join them, so to speak. In cash rich Adobe's literati, acquire them.

Earlier, it was rumored that Microsoft is poised to take over Macromedia. But later it was Adobe which pulled the trigger to form a gigantic multimedia company in an industry castigated for lack of competition and mergers are prevalent. The amount involved was reportedly around $3.4 billion in stocks and stock analysts advise a "buy" on Adobe shares.

The alliance gives a Goliath to Goliath stance against Microsoft which may be poised to explore the multimedia market. Years ago, Corel and Quark was in the playground but now it seems as if whoever joins the competition is easily gobbled by the big fishes in the industry.

As the acquisition becomes formal, we shall say goodbye to the following Adobe-Macromedia matchups:

a. Bitmap image editing division: Photoshop vs Fireworks
b. Vector illustration division: Illustrator vs Freehand
c. Web authoring division: GoLive* vs Dreamweaver

* Number 283 contender Adobe PageMaker is still alive.

I hope I can still buy products though I would expect Adobe would jack up prices. Nevermind that once-adored Macromedia Dreameaver and UltraDev (discontinued), I have loathed myself when editing www.sfc-hongkong.org in the past and now made a page 66% less code and more search engine friendly than those done with WYSIWYG apps. I now prefer EditPlus or even Notepad to do coding.