Breaking News

ASUS Announces Late-August Availability of ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV ASRock Announces Exciting New AMD X870E motherboards ASUSTOR 30 TB Ironwolf Pro Now Officially Supported ASUS Announces ExpertCenter P500 SFF Lexar Launches the NM990 PCIe 5.0 SSD

logo

  • Share Us
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
  • Home
  • Home
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Essays
  • Forum
  • Legacy
  • About
    • Submit News

    • Contact Us
    • Privacy

    • Promotion
    • Advertise

    • RSS Feed
    • Site Map

Search form

Why Adobe, Macromedia united for video-software fight

Why Adobe, Macromedia united for video-software fight

Enterprise & IT May 7,2005 0

Adobe Systems Chief Executive Bruce Chizen says it took the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for him to end a two-year feud with Macromedia's Rob Burgess. Three years later, a new threat from Microsoft convinced them to combine the software companies... Chizen and Burgess had clashed in 2000, when Adobe sued over a patented method for organizing information. Video-program maker Macromedia filed its own claim over graphics and sound-editing software the following year. The two settled in July 2002.

Chizen said the company's April 18 agreement to buy Macromedia for $3.4 billion was spurred in part by Microsoft's plans to introduce software that competes with Adobe. Adobe also wanted to expand its products to take a larger share of the market for digital content such as the Flash video software that Macromedia makes.

Seven days after Chizen announced the purchase, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates demonstrated Metro, a technology like Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) in the next version of Windows, due in late 2006. The plan sets up a fight to control how files from word-processing documents to video will be created and distributed on PCs and mobile devices.

Microsoft's $36.8 billion in annual sales dwarfs Adobe's $1.67 billion. Microsoft, the world's biggest software maker, spent $7.78 billion on research and development to Adobe's $311 million. If Microsoft includes PDF-style features in Windows, the technology will be distributed as widely as Adobe's.

Adding Macromedia's Flash enables Adobe to bring its technology to non-PC devices much faster than the company could do on its own, Chizen said in the interview last week.

Adobe will pair PDF, a file format that Chizen calls the "de facto standard" for sharing documents, with San Francisco-based Macromedia's Flash software, used in 98 percent of PCs to play videos. The programs will tie into more than a dozen products the companies offer to assemble documents, videos and animation.

Acrobat, the program sold to designers and business users to create PDF files, accounted for 39 percent of Adobe's sales last quarter, up from 16 percent five years ago.

The Metro program will improve the printing technology built into Windows in 1997, said Greg Sullivan, Microsoft's group product manager for Windows. "Today when we create and share and print and archive documents, we lose a considerable degree of fidelity," Sullivan said. Users "would like to see the kind of plumbing for this end- to-end document management improved in Windows."

The program's success depends on how quickly users switch and on persuading printer and handheld-device makers to add code that makes it possible for their products to display or print documents in Metro format.

To spur acceptance, the company is offering Metro free to developers.

Microsoft's past success using its Windows monopoly to crush competitors may have left developers leery, Chizen said.

The complete story is available at The Seattle Times.

Tags: AdobeMacromedia
Previous Post
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition review
Next Post
Toshiba reveals two new DVD players

Related Posts

  • Pixar, Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and NVIDIA Form Alliance for OpenUSD to Drive Open Standards for 3D Content

  • Adobe MAX Kicks Off With New RTX-Accelerated Adobe Lightroom Features, NVIDIA Studio Session and More

  • Top 3 Graphic Designing Software of 2021

  • Adobe and ServiceNow Announce Global Integration

  • Adobe's Photoshop Gets More Content-Aware Fill, Lens Blur, Type, Selections and More

  • Adobe Brings Experience Manager to the Cloud

  • Adobe Surpasses $11 Billion in Annual Revenue

  • Adobe MAX 2019: Photoshop on iPad, Fresco on Windows, Adobe Aero, Adobe Illustrator on iPad and Photoshop Camera Previews

Latest News

ASUS Announces Late-August Availability of ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV
Enterprise & IT

ASUS Announces Late-August Availability of ProArt Display 6K PA32QCV

ASRock Announces Exciting New AMD X870E motherboards
PC components

ASRock Announces Exciting New AMD X870E motherboards

ASUSTOR 30 TB Ironwolf Pro Now Officially Supported
Enterprise & IT

ASUSTOR 30 TB Ironwolf Pro Now Officially Supported

ASUS Announces ExpertCenter P500 SFF
Enterprise & IT

ASUS Announces ExpertCenter P500 SFF

Lexar Launches the NM990 PCIe 5.0 SSD
PC components

Lexar Launches the NM990 PCIe 5.0 SSD

Popular Reviews

be quiet! Light Loop 360mm

be quiet! Light Loop 360mm

be quiet! Dark Mount Keyboard

be quiet! Dark Mount Keyboard

be quiet! Light Mount Keyboard

be quiet! Light Mount Keyboard

Noctua NH-D15 G2

Noctua NH-D15 G2

Soundpeats Pop Clip

Soundpeats Pop Clip

be quiet! Light Base 600 LX

be quiet! Light Base 600 LX

Crucial T705 2TB NVME White

Crucial T705 2TB NVME White

be quiet! Pure Base 501

be quiet! Pure Base 501

Main menu

  • Home
  • News
  • Reviews
  • Essays
  • Forum
  • Legacy
  • About
    • Submit News

    • Contact Us
    • Privacy

    • Promotion
    • Advertise

    • RSS Feed
    • Site Map
  • About
  • Privacy
  • Contact Us
  • Promotional Opportunities @ CdrInfo.com
  • Advertise on out site
  • Submit your News to our site
  • RSS Feed