I was originally skeptical of the Adobe/Macromedia merger. I saw another case of a larger company buying a smaller company purely to stifle competition, usually by killing those pesky competing products. Promises of greater synergy that usually pepper the press releases associated with these mergers are usually unfounded.
Not quite two years later, I’m a convert. I just received my copy of the Adobe Creative Suite 3, Master Collection. This package includes the key Adobe and former Macromedia products for image production, vector-based illustration, layout-intensive print production, Web content development, Flash authoring and production, as well as video and audio editing. Twelve major products in all, plus some ancillary goodies.
It’s notable that Adobe has chosen to maintain and improve Dreamweaver over GoLive. To call Dreamweaver a Web authoring tool is a massive understatement. Perhaps Web development environment is more appropriate. Dreamweaver was always a step or two (or three) ahead of GoLive in feature set and capabilities, and Adobe made the right choice here.
It’s all here — in on package, one installer. I suspect it’s not lost on the Adobe bean-counters that the cost of this suite is comparable to the cost of a computer with the required hardware to run it. Separately, however, the cost of these products would be several times that of the suite price.
I see similar synergy in Adobe’s technical communication products. FrameMaker for conventional and XML-based authoring and publishing, RoboHelp for online help development, Captivate for animations, tutorials, and simulations, and Acrobat for review, collaboration, approval, and distribution. Adobe can now cover a wide range of capabilities for technical communicators. And Adobe product managers are speaking of increasing cross-product integration. It will be interesting to see where this goes.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Very nice article. I still question the pairing of FrameMaker and RoboHelp, but only because it’s yet to successfully be done. Of course, Adobe doesn’t have to go the single-source route, either…
Thanks, TechCommDood. You’re right that FrameMaker and RoboHelp have not yet been successfully paired. Importing FM content into RH is tedious and usually requires substantial re-work on the RH end. This may be the most obvious area for Adobe to “fix” in getting these products to work together better.
Good observations, but misses the overarching point that Adobe is still one step short of where it needs to be. They’ve come out with an elegant and powerful suite of tools, but if they ever plan to evolve beyond the desktop, they need to take the next step towards true enterprise collaboration, and take this fancy set of tools into a rich media content managment system. That will pull them into a truly integrated production process.
Where have I been that I’ve not been aggregating this feed?
Bill’s right about “successful” pairing, however there was a product back in 2003 that launched with eHelp (now owned by ADBE) called RoboHelp for FrameMaker. I wouldn’t exactly call that single-sourcing, however it did use FrameMaker files to export into RoboHelp style HTML Help, WebHelp, etc etc. It was marginally popular, however one of my clients still uses it to this day.
I believe, mostly from Vivek’s blog post you link to, Adobe may be going in this direction once again. They already own the proprietary software, it would be simple enough to retool it and launch it as FrameMaker on RoboSteroids. I’ll do a blog post on that potential soon.
DanOrtega – you’re hitting the nail on the head about Adobe’s market position. While I’ve reached similar conclusions recently about how they are handling RoboHelp, however most detail about collaboration is found within the Workflow Collaboration section of my blog:
http://charlesjeter.com/category/workflow-collaboration/
By the way, I’m currently evaluating an off the shelf enterprise collaboration for what you’re asking Adobe to do. This is for two public companies, by the way, one a defense contractor. Both already own RoboHelp x5 licenses but… they don’t use them anymore.
This Web 2.0 / MSFT mashup will be with the business-standard MS Office suite combined with command line integration of a MadCap Flare / Feedback Server. The multiple outputs – both in front of the firewall and behind it. Combined with source docs edited in existing corporate licensed Word 2007 by SMEs and compiled daily make this a hard grind for Adobe to match in cost or performance. We’ll see whether this becomes an Enterprise 2.0 killer app or not, but since MSFT ‘pwns’ the corporate office space, it could be deadly and under $5k done right.
re: Where Adobe is and where they’re going…
I think that Adobe has a gift with their packaging of CS3 for specific market audiences. My analysis of their Q3 sales looked into what they’ll do in 2008 with increasing competitiveness from several directions simultaneously.
In another life, we called it defense saturation. Microsoft is coming at their PDF world with Word 2007 and their Flash world with Silverlight, MadCap is targeting their Technical Communication products, etc. etc. Their focus can be either at increasing revenues of CS3 or rebuilding product lines like RoboHelp and FrameMaker… I’m doubting they can do both well enough to stand out simultaneously.
I’m skeptical of ADBE’s ability to manuver quick enough to make a difference. After all, this is the same company which encourages internal PDF distribution of PowerPoint files – even when they need to be reviewed and edited. If they can’t internally collaborate using MSFT Office, beating MSFT Office’s usability will be hard.
What a great blog! You’ve been added to my aggregator.
Like you, I had similar concerns when Adobe acquired Macromedia. I am a big Dreamweaver fan, and I owned GoLive (and LiveMotion) and I was worried that Adobe would replace Dreamweaver with GoLive and Flash with LiveMotion. Thankfully, neither occurred.
I wish they would figure out how to combine Frame and InDesign into one killer app. But Adobe has had the same trouble Adobe-izing Frame that it is having Adobe-izing RoboHelp; they don’t understand the code because they fired everybody who wrote it.
Anyway, thanks for a great blog and a great post.