Adobe announced that they’re finished with their acquisition of Macromedia. It’s been a mixed-bag for many real-life users out there, some being thrilled with others being worried. But most of the fears have been about user interface or software bloat.

I am not looking forward to the merger because of competition. I really only use one Adobe product, and that’s Photoshop. I’ve been using it almost daily since 1997, and I’ve stuck with it through many revisions since that time. The biggest upgrade I ever saw to Photoshop was 6.0, when Adobe added a ton of web-related features. Photoshop never had proper drawing tools, but 6.0 added vector illustration tools, new in-document text editing, layer styles, layer-based slicing tools, weighted image optimization, the liquify tool, text warping, not to mention a complete second tool called ImageReady designed just for the web. It was just a massive upgrade.

And why was it so massive? Competition, in the form of Macromedia Fireworks. Macromedia had fired a shot across Adobe’s bow with Fireworks’ advanced web-centric tools. It was Macromedia’s answer to the web-graphics problem (the problem being that Photoshop was everyone’s goto tool even though it really didn’t support web graphic creation too well). Adobe saw the writing on the wall and knew that Fireworks (which was being bundled for free with Flash, Director, and other Macromedia apps at the time IIRC) could be a threat if Adobe didn’t make Photoshop more web-friendly.

So they did. Photoshop 6.0 blew Fireworks out of the water.

And so these days, the Photoshop upgrades have had less and less in each one. I blame this partially on the fact that they have been syncronizing their products release schedules in order to release “suite” packages. But once Macromedia and Adobe are on the same side, I’m worried that Adobe will have even less incentive to innovate and upgrade their tools.

To be fair, I think there are some potential upsides, like Macromedia products being able to have draggable, stackable palettes . But I am still a bit worried about the lack of competition.

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