Saturday, December 5, 2015

Today makes ten years since Adobe bought Macromedia.

I think the best slide in any tech talk I've ever seen was in a talk at the first of the two HTML5.tx conventions in 2011. I don't remember who the speaker was. He spoke on video in HTML5. He said "This used to be a solved problem." and had a slide of Flash Gordon looking heroic with the iconic lowercase f of Adobe Flash on his chest the way Superman might wear the S. The audience laughed. Of course it stopped being a solved problem once Mr. Jobs decided he did not want to allow Flash at the iPhone and that begged the question of what to do next. Per this we now have this:

<video width="320" height="240" controls>
   <source src="http://www.w3schools.com/html/movie.mp4" type="video/mp4">
   <source src="http://www.w3schools.com/html/movie.ogg" type="video/ogg">
   Your browser does not support the video tag.
</video>

 
 

The .ogg and "browser does not support" items are failovers should their friend(s) upstream not be interpretable at a browser, though in 2015, in contrast to 2011, the .mp4 format seems golden to me and largely works everywhere. I never host video myself. If I want to use a video clip I loop in Vine or YouTube. Whatever. I digress. Anyhow, after Adobe took control of Flash, then, yes, it became to the de facto standard for web video and then it wasn't that anymore soon again after. Of course Macromedia had bought Allaire and so it had Cold Fusion when Adobe took over and so now Adobe has Cold Fusion. The day for that is perhaps done too. Fireworks is absolutely at the end of its run. At a glance it may just seem now like Macromedia was a bad purchase for Adobe as the most impressive products it offers (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat) where products it just had to begin with while the Macromedia products have all aged badly comparatively. Don't be too quick to judge. There is something to be said for slaying a competitor and from the outside looking in I don't know how much of a thorn-in-the-side was alleviated from Adobe or how lucrative it may have been in the short term for them to milk the Macromedia acquisition (though I know the surprise with the iPhone's shutout of Flash had to hurt and could not have been in their projections). With regards to slaying a competitor, Macromedia was a thorn-in-the-side to some extent for sure, in direct competition with Adobe. I don't have a formal background in computer science. The only education I have beyond high school is an Associates in Multimedia from a technical college in Waco and one day while I is college, I, and some peers, went to a tech talk in Dallas somewhere which Macromedia was putting on on xRes, its would-be rival to Photoshop which looked like a plagiarized Photoshop with some optimizations. (Things that were floating above the background layer were kept in "objects" instead of "layers" making the app snappier.) Macromedia Freehand was a comparable rip-off of Abode Illustrator and these knockoffs (I don't know how Macromedia got away with it) had to be hurting Adobe's sales. Could their you-rent-Photoshop-monthly-from-us model of today even exist if they still had Macromedia offering to just sell you the same thing directly? At the event I attended in either 1995 or 1996 Adobe set up a booth outside of the space Macromedia rented to hand out swag to try to do damage control as a counterweight to all the badmouthing Macromedia was doing of them. I bet Adobe doesn't miss that!

I only offer this video clip as an example of embedding a video clip as I was talking about such stuff above. I found it online at w3schools' web site. I don't know how to tie it into my topic. Perhaps Adobe is the bear fishing for fish (customers) and Macromedia is the seagull fishing for fish (customers) which flies away at the very end, chased off by the bear. I guess a better analogy would be if the bear ate the seagull so it could turn its attention back to fish. Whatever. Are those birds "sea" gulls if they are at a river? (dunno)

No comments:

Post a Comment