Adobe GoLive

~ the last words ~

golive sat in a part of the web-authoring market that did not reach turkey at meaningful scale. anyone i knew in the late 90s who built a homepage did it in microsoft frontpage if they were on windows, or in notepad if they had picked up enough html to type tags by hand. golive was a mac-side product mostly, with a smaller windows release later. mac penetration in turkey at the time was somewhere under 2%. you saw a golive box on the shelf of a design studio in istanbul, maybe, but never at home.

the product started in 1996 as a small german-and-californian operation called gonet communication. their app was golive cyberstudio, a mac-only html editor that became known for clean code output and proper css support back when most WYSIWYG editors generated tag soup. adobe bought the company in 1999, rebranded the product as adobe golive, and put it into the same boxes as photoshop and illustrator. for a few years it had a real user base of mac designers who refused to use dreamweaver.

then adobe bought macromedia in 2005. macromedia had dreamweaver, which was already the windows side of the WYSIWYG market and had a strong mac following too. adobe now owned both products. they shipped CS3 in april 2007 with dreamweaver as the primary html editor, kept golive 9 in a parallel CS3 box for a year, then announced in april 2008 that golive sales and development were ending. golive 9 was the last version that ever shipped.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

golive's pitch was that it generated cleaner html than the competition. frontpage was infamous for producing nested tables and microsoft-flavored markup that would not render correctly in netscape. golive output something closer to what a hand-coder would write, with proper indentation and standards-leaning syntax. for the people who cared about that, golive was the right product. for the much larger group who just wanted a homepage online by tuesday, the html quality argument did not move the purchase decision.

~ what really happened ~

the macromedia acquisition was the cause of death. adobe paid $3.4 billion for macromedia in december 2005, mostly to acquire flash. dreamweaver was the bonus that came with it, and it made golive redundant overnight. adobe could have killed dreamweaver and kept golive, but the user math was not close. dreamweaver had more users on both platforms by every measure that mattered. the company made the obvious call and the smaller product went.

~ what it became ~

nothing. unlike imageready, which had its features absorbed back into photoshop, golive had nothing to fold back into. dreamweaver replaced it cleanly. some of the visual-layout ideas in golive showed up later in adobe muse, the 2012 attempt at a WYSIWYG site builder for designers who did not want to touch code. muse got killed in 2018. by then golive was a forgotten footnote inside the larger story of adobe slowly losing the web-authoring category to wordpress and squarespace.

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