Adbromedia


Adobe + Macromedia
Am I the only person somewhat horrified by this? The Adobe/Macromedia merger was finally approved over the weekend, so now Adobe has started to sell Macromedia products via their online store, as one would expect. What you might not expect is the truly grotesque “bundles” now available. Instead of waiting until their products actually worked together, or at least until a new sort of package design could be done, Adobe did the “next best thing”… bitch slap the two products into one box, including the artwork. Thus I give you the Adobe Web Bundle. Ewww.

Strangely, though, the upgrade price is kind of a deal, assuming you have old versions of CS and Studio. $900 bucks isn’t too bad to get Creative Suite Premium and Studio 8… well, relatively speaking… better than 1500 bucks or more. What’s really bizzare is the fact that Adobe also introduced the Design Bundle, which is CS2 Premium (like the Web Bundle) + Flash 8 Professional (instead of the entire Studio 8 suite, which in the Web Bundle includes Flash 8 Pro)… and the upgrade, for some reason, costs fifty dollars more than the Web Bundle upgrade. That makes about as much sense as the packaging…

I work for an online software store, and I’m curious to see if that’s actually what the packaging will look like, or if they’ll get something better by the time it ships… or, and I completely expect this to happen… Adobe just tell us to ship both seperate boxes and/or sends out empty boxes for us, the middle guy, to cram both products in.

Other weirdness… Todd Dominey reports that Adobe plan to roll Flash Player and Acrobat Reader into one blob of a product. Ewww again. Can we have a splash screen to tell us flash is loading? Or maybe just the spinning beach ball of death…

Oh, and try visiting Macromedia.com… “formerly Macromedia.” That just seems weird.