Adobe is so money hungry,. CS is a poor excuse and Full “Paid” versions lock up like an unregistered version. Remember when you at least got 30days customer service.!

Yeah, that was today.

Those with legal copies of the software have no difficulty with “lock up”.

In a recent interview with Investors Business Daily, Stephen Elop, CEO of Macromedia, expressed confident optimism about Adobe-Macromedia merger, DOJ investigation, and customer reaction.
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The broad sentiment among our customers, among the po…

Interested in your comment about web layout being low priorty, what products are they after other than Flash, I would think DreamWeaver is far superior to GoL with many many extentions to enhanced it’s few short comings.

As a hand-coding web designer, I’m not fully qualified to evaluate DreamWeaver against GoLive, so I’ll defer to the common wisdom that DreamWeaver is a better application in general. GoLive still has tighter integration with the other Creative Suite applications, making it a better application for use with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. For example, DreamWeaver has no equivolent to GoLive’s Smart Objects technology.

Regardless of which application survives the merger (if not both), future versions of Web editing applications from Adobe will benefit from the combined technology of Adobe and Macromedia. Even if DreamWeaver is divested, future versions of GoLive will have DreamWeaver’s strengths and be atleast as good as current versions of DreamWeaver. The inverse would be true if DreamWeaver is retained and GoLive divested.

Mobile content publishing (MCP) is the big motivator behind the merger. MCP is heating up as a media and industry; it’s one that certain other giants (Microsoft most notably) are hell bent on controlling. Neither Adobe nor Macromedia really has all the pieces in place to adequately prevent Microsoft from steamrolling over MCP competitors. Combined, however, with Macromedia’s content delivery technology and Flash, combined with Adobe’s size, money, and the loyalty of its immense customer base, just might be able to prevent Microsoft’s dominance of MCP.

I’m not one of these fanatic Microsoft-haters, but I am a pragmatist. Microsoft’s business model is not focused on creating consumer choice or even answering existing market needs. Whatever market Microsoft dominates is forced, to some degree, to do things the way Microsoft has decided is best.

Adobe, by contrast, spends millions of dollars on efforts to understand current and future market needs. Adobe also helps create choice. To wit: Adobe invented PostScript fonts and PDF, both of which are open specifications that are used by other companies to compete with Adobe products. Microsoft guards its patents like a junkyard dog.

Critics of the proposed Adobe-Macromedia merger often claim that competition is the only thing that drives innovation. In most cases, with most types of products and most companies, that’s true. However, Adobe operates on a different philosophy. Look at Photoshop. For ten years Photoshop has been a virtual monopoly—every professional uses Photoshop for raster editing—yet Adobe has never slacked off on Photoshop innovation or effort. Adobe still invests a lot of time and money in talking to Photoshop users, learning users’ workflows, understanding pain points and feature requests.

Now, if that isn’t enough to convince you, consider what’s really at stake. MCP will, by all accounts, be as big a revolution as the Web was. MCP is the precursor to a revolution in broadcasting, when hypertext television will become a reality. Who ever becomes the dominant force in MCP in the next five years will likely be the one that defines much of the future of interactive broadcast media and the next major content publishing revolution. Macromedia is the only company at the moment with mature technology capable of achieving that potential, but Macromedia doesn’t have the money, user base, or related technologies to be able to win against Microsoft in all out war for MCP and its future. So, rather than focus on the potential drawbacks of the merger, ask yourself who you would rather see in control of MCP and its future, Adobe or Microsoft?

Macromedia will soon suck as much as Adobe.