Adobe Buys Macromedia
Wow. Huge news today. Probably the biggest news in our development world in the last 10 years. There is a Reuters story here and a blog post by Mike Chambers here.
So, where does this leave Flash and Director? No need to mention Flash, as I’m sure that’s what Adobe is after. They will probably kill off the FlashPaper thing or merge it with the PDF format. So maybe some more integration between PDF and SWF? Probably.
As for Director, it is hard to say. It doesn’t really compete with anything in the Adobe world. It is profitable. So odds are they will keep it as is.
I’d say there are three possibilities.
1. Adobe keeps Director as is, maybe with a little more support for new developments (I can’t imagine it having less support, so it must be more).
2. Adobe isn’t interested in Director, so it sells it off to another company. Director is worth something, so if Adobe doesn’t want it, they won’t just throw it away.
3. This is the dangerous one: they take Director in a whole new direction, like as a Flash wrapper tool or only focusing on one aspect like DVD or such.
If I were a betting man, I’d say that the first one is 70%, the second one is 10% and the third one is 20%. But I’ll probably change my opinion by the end of the day.