Adobe Buys Macromedia - initial thoughts
This makes sense. Although Adobe and Macromedia have competed on the content creation front over the past years, starting out from the print world in Adobe’s case and the CD-ROM world in Macromedia’s case, this should allow the combined organization to focus on making the existing tools play better, and move on to the broader problem of document and information management.
Life will be just fine for the existing customer base of print and interactive developers, who will probably end up with a toolbox of Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, InDesign, and Acrobat, each of which are great, even dominant, in their categories, have loyal user communities, and will become more useful as they become better integrated.
The more interesting question is the one the merger is predicated on, which is how to address the broader space of document workflow and information management.
Adobe has been training everyone to think of PDF as “electronic paper”, in that it behaves like a printed document with well defined, mostly fixed presentation of a text and graphics. This is mostly how it is used today, literally replacing paper documents in print-on-demand applications such as product literature, distribution of paper forms for health, government, and corporate applications, or formatted output of books and publications.
Macromedia Flash, on the other hand, is geared toward dynamic graphic presentation, and almost nothing is static, but it can and typically does retrieve new underlying content to be presented through the Flash software client. Complex multimedia presentations are routinely implemented in Flash, including entire web sites. Flash is a more a programmable content presentation system than anything else.
PDF excels at migrating a paper-based workflow model to an online environment, because it turns paper documents into something digital that can be moved around electronically. While paper isn’t going away for a long, long, time, if ever, the problem in the corporate / enterprise space is that we may be moving to an environment where we aren’t starting out with static data very often, and the document is coming from an array of content sources. This is an area where Flash might do well, if other approaches such as Ajax don’t solve enough of the problem.
Look at this blog or any news site as a very simple example. None of the articles posted are actually fixed documents, they’re all facets of an underlying database of content. Now think about the information handled in various corporate workflows. A lot of it already lives in an assortment of databases, some of them actual “databases”, but also many document files scattered across the hard drives of the company. A lot of documents floating around are really a sort of snapshot of a particular view of the underlying data at a point in time. Taken further, we get XML-based interactive documents such as Google Maps, or similar applications such as these demos at Laszlo Systems. It’s not a stretch to imagine existing blogging software wrapped around existing databases and data sources within an enterprise and publishing RSS feeds which are automatically aggregated into “workflow” documents, this is already starting to appear in bits and pieces.
Hardcopy output has a huge advantage in being persistent technology — we can be reasonably sure that the paper document can be read in 50 years, while the same can not be said about the PDF document on CD-ROM, DVD, or any other current storage media. But it also seems that a direction for “documents” will be towards presenting faceted views of the data content available to the publisher. PDF has the “paper” part covered. Flash is useless for “paper” but has a great installed base of dynamic presentation clients.
I would find it disconcerting if the “paper” PDF documents started updating themselves with much more than customer contact data or similar, and I don’t think I’d trust a Flash web site to give me the same content from one week to another. That might be just an age thing, since I’m used to “paper” behaving a particular way, which might change in the future.
Adobe has needed to do something on the enterprise side for years. After bringing in Macromedia, they’ll still need to find a way to address the content / information management side, but Flash seems like a better fit to interactive documents than retrofitting dynamic presentations into PDF.
Next, they need to link up with some content management / database / XML solutions that are both human-friendly and auditor-compliant.
updated 04-27-2005
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