Adobe Buys Macromedia

So, Adobe is buying Macromedia for a cool $3.4 billion. While I’ll let the pundits ruminate on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, there are just two tangentially-related points that I will comment on.

The first is that Macromedia’s Flash technology is, like most technology, capable of being used for good or ill. This was brought home to me yesterday while compiling the list of "Wines I Have Known". I tried, wherever possible, to include a hyperlink to a wine producer’s web site in my entries. A lot of these web sites used Flash on the entry page. And, with very few exceptions, their use of Flash was utter, utter crap. Where was usability? Where was the user experience to entice the user into the site and deliver information? Nowhere. Instead all I got was completely pointless Flash animations, done purely because the web designers thought it was a cool thing to do. Take it from me: it is not cool, it is fucking counter-productive.

So, point one: Flash technology should be used with extreme care, and preferably NOT AT ALL on home pages.

Point two: I really don’t think Adobe know how to program. Yes, their applications may be powerful, but their user interfaces stink like rotting fish, and they blithely ignore any conventions of the underlying platform. I’ve complained before on this blog about Photoshop Elements, but other stuff of theirs is just as bad. They remind me of SAP – you vill learn to do it our way, or else! I remember many years ago pointing out to Dr. Peter Zencke (one of the directors of SAP) that I thought that their user interface in SAP R/3 would be better following the user interface guidelines of the underlying platform, to whit, Windows. I got an earful which told me in no uncertain terms that he just didn’t get it. Well, I don’t think Adobe gets it either.