Macromedia’s aborted vision….

The announcement last week, that Adobe was buying out Macromedia, must surely have came as a rude surprise to customers and users of Macromedia’s products and services. Our company Uzanto operates in the domain of web services based on Rich Internet Applications, a space that so far has been dominated by Macromedia.This announcement, although not having much significance to us in the short run, will most certainly impact the future of web services in a very fundamental manner.

It was only last month, that I happened to attend the Macromedia Max 2005 Conference at New Delhi. Initially, the conference seemed to come across as some sort of an annual ritual, a once-a-year must have kind of sales pitch cum orientation workshop. However, what seemed to stand out during the event was a very concerted and focused effort by Macromedia’s trainers to go beyond their usual constituency of web designers and try to reach out to the developer community at large. One of Macromedia’s trainers recounted a personal incident where he happened to go to IBM’s office to meet somebody and introduced himself as coming from Macromedia–his host apparently was quite amused to meet somebody from Macromedia for the first time –a company, whose products ( he thought ) were best known for making “ those shocking websites where everything on the screen seemed to jump up and down with an astonishing regularity ”. Those early days of ridicule by the developer community, according to him, were now passé. The seriousness with which the world had started taking Macromedia could be gauged from the fact the Flash Player had now become a standard plug-in that shipped out with every copy of the Windows SP2 update.

Quite clearly, the strategic focus of the conference was on getting the message across that Macromedia was much more than a company whose products were meant to “create those bells & whistles” on the web; rather, with core development platforms like the emerging FLEX and Cold Fusion under its belt, it had the wherewithal to be a “nuts & bolts” company for the web based world. Unarguably , it was the prime mover for Rich Internet Applications, which promised to replicate the interactivity and user experience of desktop packages in web based applications. Buoyed by the spread of broadband, the growing popularity of web services as a delivery mechanism for selling products and services over the internet and the success of RIAs in delivering substantial incremental ROI, Macromedia thought that being at the forefront of the RIA paradigm, it was uniquely positioned to emerge as the “Microsoft of the web world”.

Sitting there in the conference hall, the Macromedia promise seemed very real and inspiring to me; Macromedia managers had a swagger in their walk, much to everybody’s rapt attention as they demonstrated some of their latest product innovations, that were to be launched in the coming months.

However, destiny probably has a different future in store for Macromedia and its products. In this big bad world of mega mergers and takeovers, where the left hand does not know what the right hand is unto, the fate of companies can change in double quick time.

With Adobe buying out Macromedia, it would be very interesting to see what Adobe plans to do to Macromedia’s brand name and its products. While it is likely that the real intention behind Adobe’s buyout is to simply kill any likely competition that it might have otherwise faced from Macromedia in the design workspace, it is quite possible that Adobe actually saw the future of web services and Macromedia’s role in it as the most attractive takeaways in the buyout process.

What the future holds for Macromedia’s aborted vision, only time will tell……