Macromedia

» see macromedia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Macromedia was incorporated on 25 February 1992 to hold a merger between two companies that were each losing the argument on their own. Authorware Inc. had been founded by Michael Allen in 1985 and sold an authoring tool for interactive training. MacroMind-Paracomp sold Director, which was what you used to build a CD-ROM or a mall kiosk back when a disc was a thing you could charge money for. Tim Mott of MacroMind took the chairman and chief executive job and Bud Colligan of Authorware took the president's chair, and analysts put the entire multimedia software market at $200 million with the new company holding a fifth of it.

Director carried the place for its first three years. It turned up in training programs for American Airlines and Kellogg's and on Hollywood productions including Jurassic Park. Revenue was around $30 million in 1992, and by 1993 Macromedia was the largest supplier of multimedia development tools anywhere. Then the web showed up and every assumption underneath that business went soft, because the thing people now wanted to put interactive content on was not a disc you pressed and shipped in a box.

The answer was to web-enable everything. Shockwave Player shipped in 1995 as a free Director plugin for Netscape Navigator. Altsys had arrived that January with FreeHand and Fontographer, available because the Federal Trade Commission had ordered Adobe to divest FreeHand after the Aldus purchase and Altsys went looking for a different owner. None of it held the stock up. It topped out at $63.75 in December 1995 and was down to $7.13 by 1997. Rob Burgess came in as president in 1996, cut ten percent of the staff and pointed what remained at the web.

Flash was bought rather than built. Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software in January 1997 for FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool originally aimed at pen computers, renamed it and gave the player away free to force the install base up. Dreamweaver came out of iBand's Backstage codebase, bought for $32 million in March 1996 and shipped in December 1997; by October 1999 about two thirds of professional web developers were using it. Allaire followed in 2001 and brought ColdFusion and HomeSite along. By 2002 the company was running more than twenty products out of thirty offices.

Adobe announced the purchase on 18 April 2005 and closed it on 3 December, a stock swap worth about $3.4 billion. The two had been suing each other over tabbed palettes five years before that. The timing lands exactly on my own window: the Turkish web I was reading between 1999 and 2005, at home on TTNet and in the internet cafes where a browser sat open behind Counter-Strike, was a Flash web. Every band and every design studio had an intro animation with a skip link in the corner. Nobody in those cafes had any reason to know which company owned the plugin, and I did not either until a long time after it stopped being that company.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ skip intro ~

What Flash actually solved was a hardware problem. On a 56k line a photographic banner was expensive and a vector animation was nearly free, so a designer could ship motion and custom typography over a modem at a moment when HTML gave you five fonts and a table layout. The player was a one-click install and the file arrived before the visitor gave up waiting for it. That combination is the whole reason the format won, and it is also why the results looked the way they did.

The side effect was a decade of websites that opened with a loading bar. Restaurants, law firms, municipalities and record labels all got the same treatment, because the tool made animation cheap and nothing in the tool suggested restraint. The skip link in the corner was an admission built into the genre. Director kept its own afterlife through Shockwave games, which is where a lot of people met the company's software without ever hearing its name.

The cost came due later. A Flash site was one opaque object to a search engine and unreadable to a screen reader, and the whole of it usually sat behind a single URL no matter where you had navigated to inside it. That was tolerable while the web was a brochure. It stopped being tolerable the moment the web became something people expected to search, and by then the format had a fifteen-year head start on any replacement.

~ the rival that bought it ~

Adobe and Macromedia had been enemies since the FreeHand divestiture in 1994, and they spent 2000 to 2002 trading patent suits over interface widgets. The purchase in 2005 was not a strategic gap being filled, it was one company buying the only serious competitor in its own market and being allowed to. Adobe got Flash, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion and the customer list, then spent the following years running products that duplicated its own.

~ what is left of the name ~

Several of the inherited products are still sold under Adobe branding. Dreamweaver kept its name outright. RoboDemo became Captivate and Breeze became Adobe Connect. The rest were closed out over about a decade. FreeHand was discontinued in 2007, Fireworks in 2013, Director and Shockwave in 2017 and 2019, and Flash Player was switched off worldwide on 31 December 2020.

The word Macromedia survives mostly inside file extensions and inside the startup splash of software people still run in emulators. Its real inheritance is less visible than that: the expectation that a browser should be able to run a program rather than display a document, which Flash established by brute force and which the standards it was killed by were built to do properly.

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