Macromedia Users: Why upgrade to an Adobe bundle?

Tuesday, January 03, 2006 3:17 PM

Posted by Jonathan Danylko | Tag: Opinion | Comments: 0 | View blog reactions

If I been purchasing Macromedia products for the past five years, why would I need to purchase an Adobe Bundle?

How many of you have Macromedia Studio 8? (Show of hands)

If you have seen the bundles offered from Adobe and you use Macromedia products, you'll notice of all the products in the bundles, there is very little Adobe can offer me from their bundles that I don't already have.

Now I understand that Adobe is a Document Management company and Macromedia is a Web development/designer company, but I'm wondering what current users who purchased or upgraded to a full version of Studio 8 (including me) will do. Do I really want Flash integrated into Acrobat?

If you go through everything in the Studio 8 suite, we can break down whether Macromedia users would be interested in purchasing an Adobe bundle.

Dreamweaver

Let's start with Dreamweaver. Being with Dreamweaver since inception, I have come to accept Macromedia as THE standard for web development/design with its open architecture and extensibility. I have used GoLive! once. Granted, it was in the 1.0 stages, but with the direction it was going, I wasn't impressed. Since Dreamweaver has won many awards for it's product and has developed such a strong following, I see no other product that even comes close to it's versatility and community support...and that includes Visual Studio.

Fireworks

On to Fireworks. I'm in the same camp as Kim Cavanaugh from CMX and all of the other Fireworks experts. I agree that you can do anything in Fireworks as fast as, or even faster, than Photoshop. There have been challenges posted by non-believers and conquered by the Fireworks experts. I'm not bucking Photoshop by any means, but if I don't need to buy an updated or full version of Photoshop where Fireworks satisfies my graphics tasks, why would I pay $900 for another package just for graphics editing.

Freehand

This is the wildcard in the list. You have to be a Macromedia Studio MX 2004 user to get this package. Again, this is another product I've used since the early ages of being purchased. I'm quite happy with the product and I'm upset they let it go, but oh well. I regularly use Freehand for diagramming and web site mock-ups (although Visio is king for diagramming). If I'm proficient with Freehand, why would I want Illustrator/InDesign? For high-end print material, I understand (I can just hear my e-mail being filled).

Flash

And lastly, we come to Flash. This was the hinge pin for the merge. It seems Adobe wanted Flash to integrate into Acrobat. With Flash, there is no comparison in the Adobe world. Hence, the reason for the purchase (Duh! :-). I am very happy with Flash 8, but my happiness may be cut short because I'm curious to find out how they are going to integrate Acrobat into the Flash IDE (or vice versa...yikes!).

I'm sure all Macromedia users are still skeptical and raising an eyebrow because they're afraid of losing their favorite tool (including me).

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