Everyone Seriously Underestimates Adobe. Relax everyone.

I have been reading post after post about the Macromedia and Adobe merger, and everyone seems so worried that Adobe is going to ruin everything (especially server tools) that Macromedia has developed.

Quite a few of the people we have working here did come from a print background, and have alot of experience in working with Adobe products that probably many developers in the web/application development scene have never even heard of before.

First off, to be fearful that Adobe has no idea how to manage platforms and server oriented technology is totally 100% false. Adobe has a much larger product base of server technology than Macromedia does. The Acrobat family alone has a huge array of server products like Extreme that are well respected and widely deployed.

Even here in Ottawa the former Accelio/Jetform company that was purchase by Adobe is totally server focused.

I am absolutely positive that Adobe will welcome ColdFusion into their product lineup, and I see it being very unlikely that they would take such a powerful and well respected tool and wreck it. Many people were very excited about the addition of and I only see that getting much better in the future.

Now as for developers and programming languages, I also get baffled by those who believe that Adobe will screw all that up. You are talking about the company that is responsible for the creation of Postscript, as well as the evolution of it that is now PDF. You are also talking about the company that created the SVG plug-in, and also created the closest thing to a Flash competitor there ever was. I think that they are fully competant to keep pushing Flash/Flex and Actionscript to higher and higher levels.

In regards to PDF and SWF coming together, word around the community is that it will do so in Apollo (the Universal Client) that we have yet to see, not the Flash Player itself. I just cannot picture Kevin Lynch sitting in meeting and seeing him going along with any decision that would make the Flash Player even 500k bigger.

So relax everyone. Adobe are not idiots, and they are way more experienced in many of these fields than many of us even know. There is no chance that they would work so hard to aqquire Macromedia and destroy all the momentum their work has built up.

In my mind, things are only going to get better.