Goodbye to Freehand, GoLive
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 30, 2006 at 6:03am
During the Adobe Live event, Robert Raiola of Adobe Systems France said that Adobe will halt the development of Freehand and GoLive, according to MacGeneration.
Adobe will support these two products for some times. Adobe will concentrate all its efforts on Illustrator 13 and Dreamweaver (which will have a new interface similar to other adobe products). The canning of Freehand and GoLive is no big surprise. Since Adobe purchased Macromedia, the company had two illustration packages (Freehand and Illustrator) and two web design apps (GoLive and Dreamweaver) in its repertoire. As these products were previously competitors, it seemed likely only one in each category would survive.
Adobe completed its acquisition of Macromedia in December. The acquisition was accomplished in a stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Macromedia, a company that has been rumored at times to be a possible acquisition by Apple, is best known for its Flash, Dreamweaver Web publishing software and FreeHand illustration package.
Under the terms of the agreement Macromedia stockholders received, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. In the combined company, Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe, continues as CEO and Shantanu Narayen will remain president and chief operating officer. Stephen Elop, president and chief executive officer of Macromedia, joined Adobe as president of worldwide field operations. Murray Demo remained executive vice president and chief financial officer. John Warnock and Charles Geschke are co-chairmen of the board of directors of the combined company and Rob Burgess, chairman of the Macromedia Board of Directors, joined the Adobe Board. Needless to say, there was a lot of of new business cards that had to printed.
(Thanks to Chris Laporte of MacGeneration, a French-speaking publication for Mac users, for his heads-up and help on this article.)
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 10,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
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