Community Chronicles 0.1: Now They've Really Done It
By Jared Rypka-Hauer, Community Correspondent
Introduction
Two and a half years ago, I was sitting at my desk reading blogs when I ended up at the Macromedia news page, which stated, in black-and-white, that Adobe was buying our beloved mother ship. Within 24 hours, the Macromedia community was buzzing with the traditional fear, uncertainty and doubt: we worried that Adobe would kill our favorite products, destroy the community programs and drag us all into the corporate bureaucracy that we believed Adobe to be. We feared they would kill ColdFusion and Fireworks and force us all to use Photoshop+ImageReady or LiveCycle... neither of which carried our passion, and some of which we couldn't afford even if they did.
Frankly, we had reason to doubt Adobe (or so we thought). Their products weren't sexy. We knew they had a very minimalist approach to community programs. Many of us enjoyed working with Macromedia, not just because their products kept us all productive and interested, but because Macromedia was hip and exciting. They were big enough to be global and small enough that the product teams were close to the people who used them. We had a great thing going and we didn't want it to crash and burn.
If only we'd known... we could have saved ourselves so much worry.
This year, though, is the year that Adobe has proven to the world, to the former Macromedia community, and to its own shareholders, that the purchase of Macromedia was, in fact, a good thing. With the launch of CS3, Flex, Air and ColdFusion 8, and with MAX sold out at over 4,000 attendees, it's safe to say that Adobe has done well and shows every sign of continuing to do well. They've planned smartly for the post-Macromedia era and things look good for the whole community, for the internet, for the end users of the products we build... and couldn't look much worse for the competition.
Community
Not only has Adobe kept alive the community programs we all love, but they've enlarged them, invested in them, and absorbed the original Adobe product line into the same community programs that we've enjoyed for years. Of course we have,
says Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, Adobe definitely had a faithful community of its own, but it was spread out between the Macworld crowd and various other design and publishing groups. What we didn't have was the sort of ownership over the community programs that Macromedia had developed over the years. We felt it was important to pull our community together around the Adobe brand and purchasing Macromedia gave us a huge head start in building up those programs.
What I find most interesting is the juxtaposition of the current reality with our greatest fears from two years ago. Those of us that feared for the community programs and projects couldn't have been more wrong. Let's face it, change comes hard, and any new master has to be proven before being trusted. I think, however, the present state of the industry speaks for itself. Since Adobe took over, they have more than doubled the size of the former Team Macromedia (now called Adobe Community Experts), and new teams have been added to represent the entire Adobe product stack. There are now more than 350 User Groups worldwide, representing all of Adobe's products.
Since the merge is now complete, we've been able to both increase the size of the community programs and provide our community leadership groups with better benefits,
says Jonathan Wall, Group Manager of Developer Relations at Adobe. Adobe has heavily invested in the community and made resources available at every turn.
According to Wall, Adobe has made the community programs a priority within the company. They've been able to expand not just the programs themselves, but the online tools available to the community, such as the newly revamped DevNet, the Flex Cookbook, and the Adobe Dev Center introNetwork – a new Developer Connection unveiled at MAX which allows developers to build cross-community relationships with other developers based not just on technological interests but on a complete personal and professional profile.
In other words, our worst fears were unfounded. One of Adobe's primary interests in purchasing Macromedia was the community relations foundation that Allaire Corp and Macromedia had already built and they've done an exquisite job in building on that foundation since they took over.
Products
Coming from the Macromedia community, our other big concern was that Adobe would kill off our favorite products and replace them with their own versions. None of us wanted to see Fireworks die and be replaced with Photoshop+ImageReady. But they haven't... in fact they've only killed off a couple of products (like FreeHand) and bundled, enhanced, and promoted everything in their lineup, regardless of where it came from.
While I was talking to Bruce Chizen, I asked him about Adobe's other motivations in purchasing Macromedia. We noticed that nearly every site out there was built using Adobe technologies. Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF... we were heavily involved in the internet, and yet our image wasn't that of a web technology company, whereas Macromedia's was. We wanted to increase our visibility in the internet arena and build a full-stack solution, from concept to production servers, and buying Macromedia was a very symbiotic way to do just that.
So our fears and worries that Flash and PDF would get mashed into something bulky and useless, that ColdFusion would die, and that Fireworks would get killed off in favor of ImageReady, were unfounded. Adobe was looking to combine their stability and reputation with the internet-centric focus of the Macromedia product stack to entrench themselves at the center of the world-wide web, and killing off key products wasn't going to make that happen. With ColdFusion as their premier all-purpose web application server product and the old Macromedia Studio products repackaged with Adobe's production tools into the CS3 suites, AIR making it possible to blend Flash, Flex, HTML and PDF into a seamless desktop application, and Flex's open-source packages of pre-bundled RIA goodness, there's nothing that even approaches Adobe's current domination of the web-based (and print, don't forget print) workflow.
Due to this very symbiotic connection between Macromedia's products and Adobe's clout and resources, it's now possible to build more powerful, robust applications than we could before, with a broader blend of technologies than ever before, on shorter timelines than we could have dreamed of two years ago. It's truly a remarkable time to be involved in the industry. Since the middle of 2005, we've seen amazing things happen, especially for ColdFusion. For years we fought to see ColdFusion take its rightful place beside Flash and Flex and Macromedia Studio on Macromedia's home page. On the labs site (http://labs.adobe.com), we waited and hoped to see ColdFusion listed as a premium product. It never happened... until the ColdFusion 8 launch. Suddenly ColdFusion was listed next to Acrobat 3D and Adobe CS3 as a premier product on the labs site. ColdFusion got a spot on the front page of Adobe's website (http://www.adobe.com). The product team was expanded, and the launch of ColdFusion 8 was historic, with more new features, improved deployment options, and better performance than we'd ever seen before.
And finally...
Adobe didn't just buy Macromedia and sit on the technology. They've embraced it, traded information and technology back and forth, and built upon it. They've integrated the Macromedia product stack into their own, merging, blending and innovating at every turn. In almost every situation, there's a downside of some sort, but in the case of "Macrodobia," it's hard to find one. Each and every new product release has been excellent, and each and every new product has shown more signs of deeper and deeper integration and cross-pollination between the former Macromedia product lines and the Adobe product lines. I suppose that's because when Adobe bought Macromedia, they went all-out and have made a point to focus on the best of each company, building and innovating upon the combined strength of both.
Fast-forward two years and I honestly think we can call Adobe's purchase of Macromedia a truly good thing. Good for the products. Good for the product teams. Good for the community. Good, ultimately, for Adobe. But the true winner in this whole equation is the end user of the applications we build using the Adobe product stack. It's good for the end user. Whether we're talking about turnkey solutions, consulting gigs, enterprise applications, or just a personal photo album, having Adobe's backing for our ventures is a good thing.
Jared Rypka-Hauer is Senior Software Engineer at Alagad, founder of the cf.Objective()conference, and has been working in IT since 1990. His skills are wide ranging, and include a knowledge of end-user support and infrastructure, ColdFusion and web development, and an Object Oriented approach to building applications. Jared's articles are regularly featured in his blog, cf.Objective(), on his employer's blog (http://www.alagad.com/go/blog), and in venues such as Fusion Authority. He is currently one of several skilled worker-bees at Alagad, making the world a better place by building the best software possible.