Macromedia Weblogs – Mike Chambers, Developer Relations Product Manager
Blogged by Mike Chambers – News, resources, info and links on everything Flash from a Macromedia Product Manager for Developer Relations.
Well, as you probably have probably heard by now, Macromedia and Adobe announced this morning that our companies are combining. If you are like me, then I am sure there are a ton of questions going through your head. We have put up a mini site with more information, but I wanted to make a quick post to put some more context around what is happening.
First, Macromedia and Adobe have announced that we are combining into a single company. However, and this is a very important point, this has not occurred yet, and will not occur until approved by stockholders and government regulators. This is an important point, because during this period, there will be some legal constraints on what I (and other Macromedia employees) can and can’t speak about in public (see the end of the post for an example). So, please keep this in mind if you ask a question and are referred to the FAQ or web site.
So, with that in mind, I can’t actually go into too many details. Day to day work at Macromedia will continue on as it has been. We are still working on 8ball, Maelstrom and everything else we have been working on. We are still planning to ship sometime in the second half of this year. We are still committed to Flash as a development platform (probably more than ever now). We are still committed to our server products, such as ColdFusion (7 has been incredibly successful) and Flex.
How will this affect the Macromedia culture? We have worked hard over the past couple of years to get closer to you, communicate more directly and more often. We have tons of employees participating in the community, whether it be through mailing lists, forums, weblogs or contributing code. I think that it is this culture of openness and participation that has made us so successful over the past couple of years. This is not going to change. Indeed, I think that this culture of openness and participation is one of the reasons that Adobe was interested in bringing our companies closer together.
We are going to work hard to make sure that everything moves forward smoothly, but there are sure to be some bumps along the way. However, I am confident that as long as we continue to be open, and communicate clearly we will all come out of this in a much stronger position. We will able to compete more effectively, innovate more, and be more responsive than we would have been able to do on our own.
How do I feel about this personally? Well, of course, I was a little surprised at first. But, now that I have had some time to think about it for a while, I am actually quite excited. I strongly believe in the potential of Flash as a cross-platform solution for deploying rich content and applications (I can’t stress the cross-platform part of that enough). Together, the combined company will have the resources on our own to make the platform successful on a larger scale. So, personally, I am excited about this because, after the combination closes, Flash as a platform will be driven by a much, much larger company (combined we would be over $2 billion a year in revenue), with a lot more resources at its disposal. I think it makes it much more likely that Flash will play a significant role as the next generation application / content platform (one that is ubiquitous and cross platform).
I think it makes things very interesting…