Listening To: Remixed : Cabaret Voltaire

In case you missed it (like I did), there have been some very scary mergers and acquisitions of late in the world of design/graphics software publishing. Even scarier, I haven’t seen too many designers out in blog-land and elsewhere discussing these somewhat unsettling developments. It’s almost as if they have somehow slipped under our collective radar. All I can say is “what the fŨck ?” I’m scared people, very scared … and so should you be.

The first of our scary acquisitions happened back in October of last year. Corel Corporation bought out Jasc Software, makers of Paintshop Pro & the Painshop suite of image editing / album tools. Why is this so scary ? For those of you that don’t know it, PSP is in the opinion of many designers including myself, the only credible alternative to the defacto industry standard that is Adobe Photoshop. PSP started out as a unassuming shareware application along the lines of Gimp, but over the years thanks to a dedicated user base, considerable development from Jasc and the inclusion of increasing numbers of nifty features such as the ‘background eraser tool’, Python scripting and Photoshop-plugin compatability, has matured to the point where it can be seriously considered as a Photoshop alternative. The best thing about PSP prior to Corels acquisition of Jasc ? Despite its rich feature-set, which in some areas even exceeded the Adobe product it was competing with (e.g. the background eraser tool again), PSP was always far cheaper than the ridiculously over-priced Adobe offering. Around a quarter of the price, to be exact !!!

With Corels buy-up of Jasc, this situation is unfortunately very likely to change. Corel has always been Cletus, the retarded half-brother of the graphics software industry. Sure … some people use Corel Draw. They’re probably the same people who use Wordperfect. Some people use Bryce too – but this was the result of another corporate merger after all, and not something Corel had a hand in coming up with themselves. Whilst no competition for Adobe in terms of features or ease-of-use, Corels inferior software offerings have nontheless historically tended to sit at the pricey end of the spectrum. So the chances are, with this merger you can officially kiss PSP’s excellent value-for-money ROI factor goodbye. Being the retarded half-brother, it’s also likely that under Corels stewardship the innovation and continual development which one previously associated with successive releases of Paintshop is likely to be severely curtailed, if not halted completely.

There have already been rumours of significant numbers of ex-Jasc staff being given the sack by their new employer. The support program for old versions of the product (Corel has now released PSP 9.0) has become a complete shambles, and Corel has reportedly nobbled the old PSP Usenet archives. Which is a real shame indeed, given that the other fantastic feature of Paintshop Pro was always it’s world-class product support – doubly impressive in a product which was so affordably prices. The Jasc website is no more, and the Corel site does not appear to have ANY support or updates for the older Jasc software (< PSP 9.0). Essentially it would seem Corel has adopted a "fŨck them" attitude to the existing PSP userbase - which is a very dangerous precedent in an industry in which publisher amalgamation is an ongoing reality of day-to-day business.

Speaking of Adobe, this brings us neatly to the other scaaaary merger announced in April of this year. Surprisingly, given the earth-shattering nature of this revelation, it's been even less widely discussed / reported than the Corel-Jasc merger. Perhaps its because it is still relatively recent, and we haven't actually seen the merger-proper begin as yet, given the respective companies are still filing all the relevant paperwork with the SEC. Perhaps no-one wants to second-guess what this development will mean for the future of the design industry. Or maybe it's just been kept so quiet (buried deep within the 'company' sections of the Adobe & Macromedia websites, which most designers rarely if ever bother to read) that most people haven't yet realised its about to take place. Hold on to your hats kids, because

ADOBE IS BUYING UP MACROMEDIA !!!

In case you’re not a design-geek, this is roughly on par with Intel buying up AMD, or Microsoft acquiring Apple Corporation. Ok … the REST of Apple Corporation. If you’d prefer a completely non-geek analogy, it’s like Coca-Cola buying up Pepsico. As a sometime-designer, this merger scares me on a deep and primal level. This is McDonalds opening up a burger restaurant on Moscows Red Square. This is Mick Jagger receiving a knighthood. This is the end of all things good, and decent, and right with the world. In an industry dominated by a handful of big players, Adobe was always the ‘old guard’, and Macromedia the ‘young upstart’. As stated previously, Adobe’s flagshop combination of Photoshop and Illustrator have become more-or-less the defacto standard for image-editing applications over the years. With the emegence of the web however, they started to feel some serious competition from Macromedia in the 90′s, particularly as the latter concentrated on cementing the brand position of their Flash / Flash Player technology as the defacto standard for rich-media.

Coupled with a handful of complementary products such as Dreamweaver/Ultradev (the professionals choice for web design & development), Director & Authorware (CD-ROM & interactive design), and Freehand (the only credible Illustrator alternative on the market), Macromedia gradually consolidated their position as a serious rival to Adobe’s market-domination. Adobe tried to compete with second-rate releases like the excerable goLive and the creation of the industry laughing-stock that is the SVG (scaleable vector graphics) format, but in the end none of these initiatives really cut the mustard, so I suppose it’s inevitable they’ve decided to buy out the competition. What does this mean for the average designer ?

First and foremost, I think it’s once again going to come down to an issue of price. Now, Macromedia software has never been cheap. I actually had to sell my old car a few years back to finally get my hands on legit copies of the standard suite (Studio + Director). In comparison however, Adobe has always adopted the Microsoft pricing model. In other words, whilst Macromedia software has been merely expensive, Adobe’s offerings have always been hideously expensive. The initial steep fees are then coupled with pointless, incremental upgrade paths, as opposed to Macromedia’s genuine, feature-adding upgrade strategy.

Essentially what we have folks, is another bloated industry behemoth, using its monopoly position as provider of ‘industry standard’ software to gobble up any true competion, and to foist buggy, non-innovative renditions of the same old song on the people who made them their money in the first place. You don’t believe me ? What has Adobe done with Photoshop lately ? Photoshop Elements. Oooh yeah … that’s development … a cut-down version of Photoshop for the consumer digital camera market, to stave of competition from Paintshop and Ulead Photostudio ! The CS Suite (Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS etc) … puhlease … all of their recent releases seem to be minor retools of the long-matured software which gained them the industry domination in the first place. The ‘biggest’ Photoshop development in years seems to me to be the Liquify tool. Woop-de-doo ! I might as well use PS 5.5 for all the difference it will make, unless I actually need the Liquify tool (not likely). I’d rather stick to my copy of PSP 8.01 really.

With the acquistion of Macromedia, we’re likely to see new releases by the latter going down this same regrettable path. ‘Flash Elements’ anyone ? Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Adobe didn’t just rebadge Flash 4, stick in a PDF export option and try to flog it to punters for $300 precisely as that (‘Flash Elements’). We’re also likely to see the demise of Freehand in part or entirely (lets face it, why produce a product which gives your flag-ship vector illustration software a run for its money at a fraction of the latters over-inflated price ?), the phasing-out of Fireworks in favour of an ImageReady / Photoshop Elements combo, and the inclusion of the ridiculous SVG format in future versions of Flash, with the inevitable bloating of the Flash-player executable and the SWF format as a result. We might even see Macromedia / Adobe moving away from the innovative ‘open-source’ model which has underpinned the SWF format historically, and was so instrumental in helping leverage its unassailable brand-dominance in the first place.

Regretably, it also means we’re likely to see goLive around for many years to come, unless Adobe make the sensible decision of discontinuing this poor Dreamweaver clone now that they’ve got their hands on the real deal. I don’t even want to contemplate what’s going to happen to Director, given the decreasing importance Macromedia already seems to accord it in the product lineup each succesive year as Flash and its derivatives (Breeze, Flex etc.) take the lions-share of their development and support time. More than likely, we’re going to finally see the oft-predicted amalgamation of Director & Flash, in the same way Dreamweaver was almagated with Ultradev at the start of the current MX line. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing in itself, but with Adobe running the show we’re likely to see Lingo / Actionscript being crippled in the quest for ever-more ‘standarised’ interactions at the expense of developer flexibility, and the loss of native import / export options as the former try to maximise the bottom line by forcing designers to adopt other products in the ‘traditional’ Adobe suite.

That is perhaps my single biggest fear, and should be the fear of all designers faced with this dire industry development. Whereas once upon a time you could use Macromedia software, perhaps coupled with the previously mentioned Paintshop Pro, as a complete solution for your design needs without needing to touch a hellishly expensive Adobe product at all (especially if you had PDF Creator or a similar Acrobat alternative to round out your toolbox), it’s a 99.9% dead-cert that the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe means those days are over. Resistance is futile, friends, you WILL be assimilated – and you’ll pay through the nose for the privelage, mark my words !