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Cool to Coorporate

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Cool to Coorporate Wednesday evening, 21 December 2005

Okay, I accept i'm a little behind on this one. But now that i've finished my job at Bluhalo and settled down in San Francisco for Christmas I thought it's about time to share my thoughts on the Macromedia Adobe merger.

I think the clearest indication of what this means is right on the homepage of macromedia.com. Remember once, not so long ago, it was known for cool self promotional adverts right in the centre of the screen. For example, there was the volvo car video, in a typical media playback screen. Then a pencil rubbed out the player window to show the blurring of the typical boundaries of video when you use flash. Then there was the one of lady walking around the art exhibition. She was video, the art was a graphic. It showed how flash could be used to create immersive experiences and flash designers across the web went 'how did they do that?'.

Moving forward to today, all the cool showing what Macromedia do has been replaced with telling what, now Adobe, does. And to top it all off, it was written by a bunch of PR people capable of spewing coorporate biz-speak with devastating vagueness.

Lets get down with some 'Awakening creative', 'Engaging mobile', 'Connecting people' (can you say cliché?), 'Empowering enterprise'(if you couldn't before you can now), and finally, the Adobe mission statement, drum roll please - 'Revolutionizing how the world engages with ideas and information'.. argghhhh!

It starts off not too bad, I can deal with awakening creative and engaging mobile. The first is what Adobe are known for and the latter what Macromedia have been pushing at hardest. Connecting people however is meaningless tosh that every big company under the sun likes to spew out. It's almost as meaningless as 'Empowering enterprise' which really does say --- .

What this looks like to me is a large company that was going stale (with the exception of inDesign) and needed fresh blood to please it's stakeholders. Despite all the usual promises of how the smaller company will keep it's individuality the poisoning has already begun. See you in the information revolution.

 

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