Adobe LiveMotion

~ the eulogy ~

in 2001 i was 17, making forum signatures in macromedia flash 5 on a 33.6k connection in my parents' apartment in ankara. flash was the only animation tool any of us in the donanimhaber and frmtr crowd actually talked about. adobe livemotion was a thing on the other side of that fight that almost nobody i knew used.

adobe shipped livemotion 1.0 in 2000. the timeline interface borrowed heavily from after effects, which was already adobe's dominant motion tool, and the vector drawing borrowed from illustrator. you could export to flash's swf format, which was the bet adobe was making: that designers would prefer adobe's authoring environment over macromedia's even if the runtime was the same. it did not work. by the time livemotion 2 shipped in january 2002, flash mx had already taken the conversation and was on its way to becoming the default for everything from banner ads to whole websites.

the official discontinuation was announced on november 15 2003. technical support was wound down a few months later in early 2004. the product had a short shelf life and a small fanbase, mostly inside adobe shops where designers wanted to stay inside the adobe stack instead of paying macromedia for a separate license.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it was ~

livemotion's value proposition was real on paper. you got an after-effects-style timeline for keyframe work plus an illustrator-style vector tool for drawing. the export pipeline produced swf files identical in playback to flash itself. the whole thing came in an interface that already-trained adobe customers could pick up in an afternoon.

what flash had that livemotion did not was actionscript and a community of people who had been writing actionscript since 1999. flash was not just a tool. it was a programming environment with a cult of designers and hobbyists who shared.fla files on personal homepages and forums. that community was the moat. livemotion shipped without one and never built one.

~ the postmortem ~

the second-version reviews in 2002 were polite. "different strokes" was the line one creativepro review used. nobody wrote that livemotion was bad. they wrote that flash mx was already the assumption, and that switching tools to use livemotion required a reason that went beyond "it's adobe and you already use photoshop."

adobe quietly stopped doing major work on the product in 2003, and on november 15 the official end-of-life notice went out. existing licenses kept working and the product page redirected, but nobody held a memorial.

~ the funny part ~

in april 2005 adobe announced the acquisition of macromedia for 3.4 billion dollars, with the deal closing in december that year. flash, the product livemotion had been built to compete with, was now an adobe product. adobe had spent five years and an undisclosed amount fighting flash with livemotion. then it just bought flash.

flash itself stayed alive under adobe until december 2020, when adobe pulled the plug on the runtime under pressure from html5 and from steve jobs' 2010 "thoughts on flash" letter. so adobe did eventually win the fight against flash. just not with livemotion. it bought flash and ran it for fifteen years, then killed it itself.

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