Please Note: My personal journal is now fully independent of my main personal Web site, but I am still working on some things such as my new page designs and many improvements to PageDrive, my software that runs my journal site. If you encounter any technical problems, please either just try again a while later or let me know.
So much for the competition between Adobe and Macromedia; the former is acquiring the latter. I hope this merger turns out better than the one between Fractal Design and MetaTools. Or Corel and WordPerfect (I know; WordPerfect did not make visual arts software, but Corel's acquisition of Jasc is too recent to know how it will turn out). I am concerned, however, that Adobe may soon kill off some good Macromedia applications then without any serious competition, the new behemoth will have less motivation to fix bugs before or after shipping its applications (this is already a problem for both Adobe and Macromedia, as users of Illustrator 10 and Flash MX 2004 for Windows XP and especially users of Flash Player 7 for Mac OS X can attest to).
Beyond raising competition and quality concerns, this merger ruins my Microsoft and Macromedia joke: if Microsoft Windows were any buggier, it would be called "Macromedia Windows". Now what am I supposed to say? "Adobe Windows"? It just doesn't have the same ring to it, does it?
