Macromedia was an American graphics, multimedia and web development software
company headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products
as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on
December 3, 2005. History
Macromedia originated in the 1992 equal merger of Authorware Inc. and
MacroMind-Paracomp. Director, an interactive
multimedia-authoring tool used to make presentations, animations, CD-ROMs and
information kiosks, served as Macromedia's flagship product until the
mid-1990s. Authorware was Macromedia’s principal product in the interactive
learning market. As the Internet moved from a university research medium to a
commercial network, Macromedia began investing aggressively to web-enable its
existing tools and develop new native web only products like Dreamweaver.
Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director-viewer plugin for web browsers.
The first multimedia playback in Netscape’s browser was a Director
plug-in. Macromedia licensed Sun's Java Programming Language in October 1995. In
1996, Macromedia purchased Future Wave Software and the product now known as
Flash. By 2002 Macromedia produced more than 20 products and had 30 offices in
13 different countries. = Acquisitions =
In January 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys Corporation after Adobe Systems
announced a merger with Altsys’ business partner, the Aldus Corporation. Altsys
was the developer of the vector-drawing program FreeHand, which had been
licensed by Aldus for marketing and sales. On account of the competition
with the similar Adobe Illustrator, the Federal Trade Commission issued a
complaint of Adobe Systems on October 18, 1994 ordering a divestiture of
FreeHand back to Altsys. With Macromedia’s acquisition of Altsys, it
received FreeHand thus expanding its product line of multimedia graphics
software to include illustration and design graphics software. FreeHand's
vector graphics rendering engine and other software components within the
program would prove useful to Macromedia in the development of web products like
Fireworks. Macromedia made two acquisitions in
1996. First, in March 1996, Macromedia acquired iBand Software, makers of the
fledgling Backstage HTML authoring-tool and application-server. Macromedia
developed a new HTML-authoring tool, Macromedia Dreamweaver, around portions
of the Backstage codebase and released the first version in 1997. At the time,
most professional web authors preferred to code HTML by hand using text editors
because they wanted full control over the source. Dreamweaver addressed this
with its "Roundtrip HTML" feature, which attempted to preserve the fidelity of
hand-edited source code during visual edits, allowing users to work back and
forth between visual and code editing. Over the next few years Dreamweaver
became widely adopted among professional web authors, though many still preferred
to hand-code, and Microsoft FrontPage remained a strong competitor among
amateur and business users. Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software,
in November, 1996, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool
which FutureWave Software had originally developed for pen-based computing
devices. Because of the small size of the FutureSplash viewer application, it
was particularly suited for download over the Web, where most users, at the
time, had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to Macromedia
Flash, and following the lead of Netscape, distributed the Flash Player
as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share. As of 2005,
more computers worldwide had the Flash Player installed than any other Web
media format, including Java, QuickTime, RealNetworks and Windows Media Player.
As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics
and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting
and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its
small footprint. Macromedia continued on the merger and
acquisition trail: in December 1999, it acquired traffic analysis software
company Andromedia Corporation. Web development company Allaire was acquired
in 2001 and Macromedia added several popular server and Web developments
tools to its portfolio, including ColdFusion, a web application server
based on the CFML language, JRun, a Java EE application server, and HomeSite, an
HTML code editor that was also bundled with Dreamweaver.
In 2003, Macromedia acquired the web conferencing company Presedia and
continued to develop and enhance their Flash-based online collaboration and
presentation product offering under the brand Breeze. Later that year,
Macromedia also acquired help authoring software company eHelp Corporation,
whose products included RoboHelp & RoboDemo.
= Purchase = On April 18, 2005, Adobe Systems
announced an agreement to acquire Macromedia in a stock swap valued at
about $3.4 billion on the last trading-day before the announcement. The
acquisition took place on December 3, 2005, and Adobe integrated the company's
operations, networks, and customer-care organizations shortly thereafter.
= Lawsuits = On August 22, 1997, stockholders filed a
class-action lawsuit in the California Superior Court in San Francisco,
accusing Macromedia of misleading stockholders on the company's product
success and financial health. A similar suit had been filed in July. The
class-action suit was dismissed by a federal judge on May 19, 1998.
On August 10, 2000, Adobe System Incorporated claimed that the San
Francisco-based Macromedia violated two of its patents on tabbed palettes.
Macromedia countered with a claim that Adobe infringed on Macromedia's patents
for a draw-based editor for Web pages and a hierarchical structure editor for
Web sites. In July 2002, Adobe and Macromedia reached an agreement that
settled all claims in this series of patent suits.
Leadership 1992: Bud Colligan became co-founder and
CEO of Macromedia, a position he held until 1997; he served as Board Chairman
1992-1998. 1994: Altsys Corp and CEO James Von Ehr
became a Macromedia vice-president, a position he held until 1997.
1996: Robert K. Burgess was hired as President of Macromedia, and became CEO
in 1997, a position he held until 2005; he served as Board Chairman 1998-2005, a
position he held when the company was acquired by Adobe.
1997: Betsey Nelson became Chief Financial Officer, a position she held
until Macromedia was acquired by Adobe. 2004: Stephen Elop became Chief
Operating Officer. 2005: Stephen Elop had been CEO for
three months when Macromedia announced it would be acquired by Adobe.
Products See also
Macromedia software References
External links Adobe - Stories
Adobe Feeds Weblogs