Thursday October 13, 2005, 9:27 pm
The DOJ has approved Adobe’s the 3.4 billion dollar acquisition of Macromedia leaving European approval as the only hurdle to the transaction. What this means is that you can say goodbye to Macromedia’s Freehand and Adobe’s GoLive in favor of Illustrator and Dreamweaver respectively. Though the demise of Freehand will only be mourned by about eleven users in all, GoLive has carved a nice niche for itself. I suspect that the FUD seeded by Microsoft with its announced 2006 release of new web design and authoring tools to replace the almost forgotten FrontPage must have had something to do with this marriage. I also think that this consolidation and churn may open the door for more mature development and popularity of open source alternatives like Gimp.
More info on this story here…
Thursday October 13, 2005, 11:15 am
If you felt a disturbance on the web this morning it is because there are big powers on the move. In a first step to eliminating the need to have multiple IM clients running just to keep up with your friends, MSN and Yahoo have announced yesterday that they will make their IM networks interoperable. Now this is a reversal of their previous (now musty old) deal to interoperate with AOL but MSN clains AOL was “difficult to deal with”. No surprises there though, when you are number one on your own you have little incentive to merge with number two. The biggest winner in all this though will be Google. Now AOL has to play ball with Google, Google needs AOL because they carry about a third of Google’s advertising traffic and Google’s IM is an afterthought and should be dumped in favor of AIM. Though today Time Warner is denying that there is a deal afoot, I still think that where there is smoke there is bound to be fire.
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Thursday October 13, 2005, 10:46 am
The New York Times announced yesterday that it plans to start offering “shadow ads” layed down like a watermark under editorial content. Though they are starting by just placing a corporate logo under the stock listings (now, really, does anybody under the age of eighty still read those?) and they promise on a stack of bibles that they will only use it for special occassions (huh?). This is a bad symbolic move as the only edge that a place like the NY Times has is its respectability and that is too fragile now to be bruised by this blurring of content and advertising. The fact that other media outlets are doing it with entertainment doesn’t mean they should be doing it with news. I guess nobody cares anymore though.