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Adobe+Macromedia: common cause in graphics & mobile, but where’s the blog platform

Adobe buys Macromedia. My response is “weren’t they the same company really anyway?”. Tomato tomato.

More substantively, this signals the quantitative impact of personal publishing platforms making the web accessible for a whole range of users (who might have previously turned to Dreamweaver or GoLive). The web has changed and these two giants must cope.

For Adobe, it’s also a natural step after Creative Studio, the megabundle they launched 18 months back. Back then, I expected them to experiment in the other direction — to go after the infrequent user market with on demand, not give a price break to their best customers. These are the tools of the trade for creatives, a cost of doing business; if Adobe was not able to maintain the perceived value of their tools among those guys, compared to, say, the Apple upgrade treadmill, what was next?

Today’s union makes plain the saturated, commoditized content creation marketplace. In pricing theory, bundling is a response to saturation. A user’s willingness to pay for each package on its own merits decreases as the functionality becomes more mainstreamed (despite the best attempts of vendors to feature pad); so you use the bundle to push more product, getting a little bit more from users who wouldn’t otherwise cough up. Adobe’s extracted as much growth as possible out of this bundle, and now has turned to snap up Macromedia, where it’ll bundlize and kill off products by the playbook. All business as usual.

We all publish and consume, but we’re doing it on these blogging platforms. Hard-coded, hard-copy marcom is marginalized. And what Adobe doesn’t have is a blogging platform to address this increasingly important element of content. Even worse, content management functionality is already evident in tools like WordPress. I’d look for blogging to be the next natural step here - either as an organic, as yet unannounced thing or that this behemoth will be the eventual acquirer of SixApart.

Mike pointed out the mobile angle, which I had forgotten. Ah yes, that whole rich internet application and rich client space that Tokyo used to be so interested in. Even though we’ve neatly averted a public adoption battle between SVG and Flash (I bet we’ll see Flash endure — it’s got Laszlo extending its appeal, and holds a bridgehead between the desktop and mobile worlds), there’s a new rub: the adoption of AJAX for some of the more powerful (and attention grabbing) apps like Google maps. Taking a step back, this provides an interesting contrast between organic and strategic: we see two corp sponsored initiatives merge because they are owned and directed (and thus can be merged and killed off), while the AJAX methodology just continues to gain steam.

This is all very interesting, but I still wonder how real this is for the mobile space, at least in the US. It certainly remains far out. At last Wednesday’s 106miles, Mike and Russ slalomed questions from both Tantek Çelik (Technorati) and Dave McClure (SimplyHired) seeking to understand what the now of cell phone dev is. The answer for right now and the next 12 mos (given Russ’s “complete handset turnover every 18 mos” postulation and a camera phone penetration ramp up starting Nov 2004) is SMS is the lowest common denominator capability. But now we’re 1/3 of the way into a turnover cycle with camera phones, which give users the impetus to try out data functions, as well as have the larger screensize and resolution to enable meaningful gui interaction. If I were running a company with a mobile app, there’s no way I’d aim for the now in development; I’d aim for 6-12 mos out. Would someone want to receive job notifications via SMS from SimplyHired? Sure. Would I? No, unless their filtering system only sent me spectacular items; I’d rather browse via email.

More to the heart of the matter of rich clients on mobile - with cost, speed, screensize and network reliability still at issue, the last thing I’m concerned about is the immersiveness of the application. I’m sure we’ll get there, and bet that Adobe/Macromedia will play a part, I’d just be watching to see what happens in their core markets while they wait for the device market to catch up. And keeping an eye out for that blogging platform too.