Saturday, May 14, 2005

Some amazing software will cease to exist

In the battle for "Survival of the Fittest" - Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash are expected to survive the Adobe-Macromedia merger, while Fireworks, Freehand, and GoLive will be eliminated.

This is predicted in an NPD report cited by MacNN. Photoshop and Dreamweaver customers will be least affected by the merger, as these products will remain largely intact. However, the FTC regulations may require Adobe to sell GoLive, Fireworks, FreeHand to another vendor.

NPD believes that customers will "most definitely" benefit from the merger. For example, integration between Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Flash would enable animators, Web designers and advertising professionals to "streamline their workflows." In the short run, the customer using both Photoshop and Dreamweaver "won’t need to do anything differently." Later, this customer will "probably be able to buy a single suite of tools from Adobe, resulting in significant cost savings."

Recently, sold off its font editor creator software Fontographer to Fontlab. Fontographer is a software for creating fonts while , the leader in digital typography, sells fonts. A software for creating fonts may not interest Adobe much. Fontographer along with Freehand were both products originally born at Altsys.