Adobe Purchase of Macromedia

Jason Kottke provides a very thorough roundup of the various views being put forth here.

For background, here is the BBC online article:

Adobe buys Macromedia for $3.4bn

Shares in Macromedia have risen 10% on news its US rival Adobe is to buy it for $3.4bn (£1.8bn) and integrate its software with its own.

The agreement marks the latest move in the consolidation of the software industry. In December Symantec agreed to buy Veritas in a $13.5bn deal.

Under the terms of the acquisition, US-based Macromedia’s shareholders will own 18% of the combined business.

It will be run by Adobe’s chief executive, Bruce Chizen.

Better together

With the addition of Macromedia’s products – which include computer animation, and Dreamweaver and Flash web-design software, for use on the internet and mobiles – Adobe hopes to meet the need from businesses for more integrated software.

The deal will be an all-share transaction in which Macromedia shareholders will get 0.69 of an Adobe share for every share they own.

This represents a premium of 25% a share to Macromedia’s $33.45 closing share price on the US’ Nasdaq market on Friday.

Although Macromedia’s shares rose on the news Adobe’s were down more than 11% early in the day.

Some analysts see Adobe’s move as designed to strengthen its position against Microsoft, which is working on software that could challenge Adobe’s Acrobat document display software.

Separately, Adobe said it would buy back $1bn of its shares after the Macromedia deal was completed in the autumn.

Big deal

Microsoft and Adobe could go to head to head over office-document creation software for businesses, because Adobe wants a larger share of this market, analysts said.

Moreover, Macromedia’s web-design software is one of the leading products for creating websites and both Adobe and Macromedia are starting to put their products on mobile phones.

If Adobe’s and Macromedia’s cultures meld well, they could present Microsoft with significant competition.

“Management is quite capable, but I think it is quite a big deal to be swallowing,” said Robert Sellar, a technology fund manager at the UK’s Aberdeen Asset Management, which owns Adobe shares.

However, he added that Adobe does have a very good cashflow situation.

The company also has a large presence in the consumer market through the use of its Photoshop photo editing software, as well as a growing stake in the magazine and newspaper design business with Indesign.

“Customers are calling for integrated software solutions that enable them to create, manage and deliver a wide range of compelling content and applications – from documents and images to audio and video,” said Mr Chizen, Adobe’s chief executive.

The firm said Macromedia’s president and chief executive Stephen Elop will become president of worldwide field operations at the enlarged company.

John Naughton on Photoshop

John Naughton writes excellently every week for the Observer newspaper. Here is his article from last weekend, which focussed on a Tory party candidate’s use of Photoshop on a campaign photo. He explains issues and techniques in a very clear and transparent way:

Ed Matts is the Tory candidate for Dorset South, a bucolic paradise with possibly more dairy cows than voters. Until last week, he was deservedly obscure. Now he is a global celebrity – and all because of a piece of software called Photoshop.
Photoshop, for those unfamiliar with such things, is a wonderful program for manipulating digital images. It is used by graphic artists everywhere. I doubt that there is a web designer alive who does not have a version of it on his or her computer.

Millions of digital camera users have been given a cut-down version when they bought their cameras. They can use it to touch up their photographs, eliminate the ‘red-eye’ effect caused by flash and generally tidy things up. If you have inadvertently snapped Aunt Ethel with a telegraph pole apparently growing out of her head, a few minutes with Photoshop will see you right.

Election 2005 Blogs

There are quite a few blogs popping up about the UK election on May 5. Many of them are used by news organisations to present more informal content. Here are a couple of links to the ones I look at.

Anyone read any others?

edit: Sitting as I do quite close to Democratic Services at the Council, there is a great deal of hustle and bustle to do with organising the election.

I reckon it will be a Labour victory with a majority of 60 odd seats.

Council sells abandoned cars on eBay

From The Guardian:

A council has come up with a new way of disposing of abandoned cars – selling them on the internet.
Westminster city council has auctioned a Range Rover on the UK online marketplace, eBay, with the vehicle fetching £6,600. It is now offering a 1962 Rover P5 which was owned by European aristocrat Countess Renee de Vismes and which has been in a car park for six years following her death.

“The countess’s son who lives in New York did not want the car so we have put it up for auction on eBay,” said a spokeswoman for the council.

She added: “We get a lot of cars left in car parks and we have now decided to see if internet auctioning is the best approach.

“We always try to track down the owners of these abandoned vehicles, but sometimes we are not successful.”

Around 200 cars are abandoned in London each day and the capital accounts for 40% of abandoned cars nationally.

E.E. Cummings

Fascinating article in Saturday’s Guardian about the poet E.E. Cummings:

EE Cummings became one of America’s most popular poets. But as a struggling young writer and artist, he was supported by a wealthy friend and soon found himself drawn to his patron’s wife. Their tangled relationship was to end in tragedy, reveals biographer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno