April 19, 2005
Adobe/Macromedia Merger
Honestly, my first reaction when seeing this news on the CNBC crawl yesterday morning was "meh." And, after reading through Kottke's extensive coverage this morning, my reaction is still "meh."
As Kottke points out, "the general feeling seems to be that Photoshop will kill Fireworks, Illustrator will kill Freehand, and Dreamweaver will kill GoLive." For someone working on the production end of the media content creation, this is a good thing. This consolidation translates to lower costs in training users and maintaining licenses for multiple versions of multiple design packages on multiple platforms.
The biggest downside that I can see is the weakening of innovation. If Adobe can continue to outpace the competition, I see this as a net plus for the design community.
But I don't WANT to use InDesign!
Seriously, almost all of the printers I work with are fully integrated into accepting InDesign files, but report that at least three quarters of their clients still use Quark. If it ain't broke don't fix it, right?
Posted by: matt bucher at April 19, 2005 10:30 AMI sympathize, especially if you are on the creative end and are heavily invested in Quark.
I'm not as involved in the print production side of things as I used to be, but the general opinon from others here at work is that Quark is seriously broken already. Quark is still in the lead through inertia alone. A year ago that number would have been 10 to 1 rather than 3 to 1.
My sense is that Quark is still buggy on the OS X platform, their upgrade pace is glacially slow, customer support is awful, etc. The mantra around here was changed from "PageMaker sux!" to "Quark sux!" It's mostly the lack of higher-end features (such as trasparent layers) that have people bugging out.
Same kind of mentality holds for Freehand, except it's not so much that Freehand sux as much as Freehand's "just different" and not as widely used as Illustrator. But you're right, that's small comfort for the Freehand designer.
Posted by: ken at April 19, 2005 10:50 AMBen-Lag
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