was an
American graphics and web development
Software House headquartered in
San Francisco ,
California producing such products as
Macromedia Flash . The line of Macromedia products is now controlled by its former rival,
Adobe Systems , which acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005.
Macromedia was formed by the 1992 merger of
Authorware Inc. (makers of
Authorware ) and
MacroMind-Paracomp (makers of
Macromind Director ).
Director , an interactive multimedia authoring tool widely used to make
CD-ROM s and information kiosks, was Macromedia's flagship product until the mid-1990s. As the CD-ROM market began to decline and the
World Wide Web gained in popularity, Macromedia created
Shockwave , a Director viewer plugin for Web browsers, but decided it also needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools.
To jumpstart its web strategy, the company made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired
FutureWave Software , makers of
FutureSplash Animator , an animation tool originally designed 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 at the time most users had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to
Macromedia Flash , and following the lead of
Netscape , distributed the Flash Player as a free browser
Plugin 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
Java ,
QuickTime ,
RealNetworks and
Windows Media Player . As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint.
Also in 1996, Macromedia acquired iBand Software, makers of the fledgling Backstage
HTML authoring tool and
Application Server . Macromedia developed a new HTML authoring tool,
Macromedia Dreamweaver , around portions of the Backstage codebase and released the first version in 1997. At the time, most professional web authors preferred to code HTML by hand using text editors because they wanted full control over the source. Dreamweaver addressed this with its "Roundtrip HTML" feature, which attempted to preserve the fidelity of hand-edited source code during visual edits, allowing users to work back and forth between visual and code editing. Over the next few years Dreamweaver became widely adopted among professional web authors, though many still preferred to
Hand-code , and
Microsoft FrontPage remained a strong competitor among amateur and business users.
Macromedia continued on the M&A trail and, in December was acquired in 2001 and Macromedia added several popular server and Web development products to its portfolio, including
ColdFusion , a web application server based on the CFML language,
JRun , a
J2EE application server, and
HomeSite , an HTML code editor that was also bundled with Dreamweaver.
In & RoboDemo (Now
Captivate ). Many of the developers of RoboHelp went on to form
MadCap Software which is a competitor in the help-authoring space.
On
April 18 ,
2005 ,
Adobe Systems announced an agreement to acquire Macromedia in a
Stock Swap valued at about $3.4 billion on the last trading day before the announcement. The acquisition was consummated on
December 3 ,
2005 , and the companies' operations, networks, and customer care organizations were integrated shortly thereafter.
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See Also: List of Macromedia software
For the future of Macromedia please look to
Adobe Systems for more information about the new structures of Adobe/Macromedia.
