Re:Integration Is The Killer App
by lupin_sansei on Monday April 30, 2007 @09:14PM
(#18270)
Seemed pretty successful to me:
"Adobe buys Macromedia for $3.4bn" http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4456895.stm
"The individual products within the Studio solution also remained solid, with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX standing as the company's largest individual product ... The MX family also continued to receive industry accolades." http://www.adobe.com/macromedia/ir/macr/news/2004/jul23_q104_results.html
"to make an impressive AJAX page requires a ridiculous amount of not very well structured code" ... ", do not invest in a startup that plans to make a straight IDE play."
Why wouldn't an AJAX IDE make a good investment? People would be queuing up to buy it if making impressive AJAX pages is as hard as you say it is.
Also, do a search on Expression Studio. It can also be used to make a straight AJAX page without all of the Silverlight CLR garbage.
Analyse Dreamweaver's cost/profit ratio. Remember, Dreamweaver is boxed and sold at retail. The advent of AJAX gave Dreamweaver a little more life, since to make an impressive AJAX page requires a ridiculous amount of not very well structured code. Keeping track of not very well structured code is what IDE's are good at, and what Dreamweaver's target audience is bad at. That said, as a percentage of total revenues, Dreamweaver sucks. Check it out for yourself in Adobe's latest quarterly report:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/sec?s=ADBE
Dreamweaver sales were used to bump up the "Developer Solutions" line of the quarterly report. Notice it is a small percentage. This would not be so bad, until you notice that even the line in the quarterly report marked "Other" is bigger!
Here's some free advice, do not invest in a startup that plans to make a straight IDE play.