Macromedia

Macromedia was an American and   (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash Player and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and now controls the line of Macromedia products.

Founding
Predecessor company MacroMind was originally founded as Chicago Software in Chicago, on April 16, 1984. Much of the company's early work involved contracting for other companies. In December 1985, a customized version of VideoWorks with was licensed to Apple Computer to build training discs for their early Macintosh line. MacroMind relocated to San Francisco, California in 1989 and VideoWorks became MacroMind Director.

Mergers
Macromedia was formed with the merger of Authorware Inc. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind-Paracomp that was announced in March 1992. The name was derived from a proposed multimedia file format. The combined company's raised about 27 million on  on December 14, 1993.

Macromedia Director, an interactive multimedia-authoring tool used to make CD-ROMs and information kiosks, served as Macromedia's until the mid-1990s. As the CD-ROM market began to decline and the internet gained in popularity, Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director-viewer for web browsers, but decided it also needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools.

Mergers and acquisitions
In January 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys Corporation after Adobe Systems announced a merger with Altsys’ business partner, Aldus Corporation. Altsys was the developer of the vector-drawing program, FreeHand, which had been licensed by Aldus for marketing and sales. Because of the competition with the similar Adobe Illustrator, the issued a complaint against Adobe Systems on October 18, 1994 ordering a divestiture of FreeHand back to Altsys. With Macromedia’s acquisition of Altsys, it received FreeHand thus expanding its product line of multimedia graphics software to include illustration and design graphics software. FreeHand's vector graphics rendering engine and other software components within the program would prove useful to Macromedia in the development of technologies to support its web strategy.

To jumpstart its web strategy further, Macromedia made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool which FutureWave Software had originally developed for pen-based computing devices. Because of the small size of the FutureSplash viewer application, it was particularly suited for download over the Web, where most users, at the time, had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to Macromedia Flash, and following the lead of, distributed the Flash Player as a free browser in order to quickly gain market share. As of 2005, more computers worldwide had the Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including, QuickTime, and.

Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs was received with a standing ovation during his keynote speech at the 8th annual Macromedia User Conference in October 1997, when he presented QuickTime 3.0 and VR Authoring Studio. Jobs then saw Macromedia's Final Cut at the 1998 and expressed interest in the project. Jobs had previously asked Adobe Systems to provide a consumer version of Adobe Premiere that could be bundled with the upcoming iMac DV, code named Kihei. However, as Apple had been financially struggling at the time, Adobe declined and focused Premiere on the Windows platform. In response, Apple acquired Final Cut's source code and its development team on May 4, 1998. After Adobe later acquired Macromedia and its Flash platform, Jobs denounced Flash and prevented its adoption on iOS.

In 2003, Macromedia acquired the web conferencing company Presedia and continued to develop and enhance their Flash-based online collaboration and presentation product offering under the brand Breeze.

On April 18, 2005, Adobe Systems announced an agreement to acquire Macromedia in a valued at about $3.4 billion on the last trading day before the announcement. The acquisition took place on December 3, 2005, and Adobe integrated the company's operations, networks, and customer-care organizations shortly thereafter. Bruce Chizen, the CEO of Adobe at the time, stated that it was "all about growth." However, the deal was also a defensive maneuver against the influence of Microsoft, with Chizen saying, "They have a $40 billion monopoly with unlimited resources, I'll never not worry about them."

Apple and Macromedia alumni

 * 1988-1990: John Scull, former Macintosh marketing manager, was the president and CEO of MacroMind. He was ousted before the formation of Macromedia.
 * 1995-1997: Phil Schiller was the vice president of marketing at Macromedia until he left to re-join Apple Computer.
 * 2003-2005: Presedia co-founder Kevin Lynch became Chief Software Architect of Macromedia. After Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, he became Chief Technology Officer of Adobe before leaving in 2013 to head the Apple Watch team at Apple Inc.

Products

 * List of Macromedia products at the Macromedia Wiki

Articles

 * Flash In The Pan: Historical Lessons Of Adobe's Macromedia Acquisition by Victor Wong (2015-09-28)
 * Microbe Inc. by Victor Wong (2015-09-28)