MXDJ on Adobe vs Macromedia

The April 2005 ver­sion of the MX Developer’s Journal (www​.mxdj​.com) was released yes­ter­day and I just had a peek through it. About the entire first half of the issue was devoted to the recently announced acqui­si­tion of Macromedia by Adobe and I have two prob­lems with that.

First. Until the acqui­si­tion is offi­cial and approved by all con­cerned par­ties, no one will know what this entails for the direc­tion of the new aug­mented Adobe or the future of exist­ing prod­ucts from either com­pa­nies. Any dis­cus­sion on those issues is pure spec­u­la­tion at this point and as a MXDJ sub­scriber, I would expect the mag­a­zine to offer real con­tent to its read­ers and not 22 pages of pure con­jec­ture on a sit­u­a­tion that is still up in the air.

I usu­ally look for­ward to every new issue of the MXDJ because its con­tent is usu­ally infor­ma­tive, use­ful and prac­ti­cal. The first half of the April issue is none of that. The acqui­si­tion is very big news in our indus­try so I didn’t expect the MXDJ to com­pletely ignore it but, until the trans­ac­tion becomes offi­cial and actual announce­ments are made about the larger company’s direc­tion or spe­cific prod­ucts’ future, a sim­ple edi­to­r­ial would have been enough IMO. I didn’t appre­ci­ate hav­ing half the issue “wasted” on this topic but then again, this is some­what a minor issue.

Secondly, and what is even more prob­lem­atic for me is the tone and con­tent of the actual arti­cles. I had the dis­tinct impres­sion while I was read­ing them that I was being sub­jected to an exer­cise in spin because of all the com­ments beingso one sided and pos­i­tive. Don’t get me wrong, I am a very opti­mistic per­son by nature and this acqui­si­tion might be the great­est news ever for exist­ing Macromedia cus­tomers in the end, but we just don’t know enough yet to have an informed opin­ion and pass judg­ment on the transaction.

But that’s not the main thing. My point is that there are real issues of con­cern sur­round­ing this trans­ac­tion and MXDJ chose to gloss over any poten­tial neg­a­tive effects on exist­ing cus­tomers of both com­pa­nies but espe­cially Macromedia cus­tomers. Without falling into wild spec­u­la­tions about the future of spe­cific prod­ucts myself, the main con­cern I have at this point is about the dif­fer­ence in cor­po­rate cul­tures between the two com­pa­nies. Why should that be cause for worry? One of the most level headed and com­pelling com­ments I’ve read on the acqui­si­tion is this blog entry by John Gruber at Daring Fireball. Go read it, I’ll wait.

That blog entry really hit home for me. After the acqui­si­tion, Macromedia’s com­pany cul­ture is at best bound to be heav­ily diluted and at worst it might com­pletely dis­ap­pear. Adobe is the larger com­pany here and the one doing the buy­ing so its deci­sion mak­ers will cer­tainly have more say in the direc­tion of the post acqui­si­tion cor­po­ra­tion and that wor­ries me, no mat­ter what pos­i­tive spin the Macromedia com­mu­nity pun­dits try to put on the news.