Ethan Marcotte now blogs at Unstoppable Robot Ninja.

Weblog entry:

Adobe acquires Macromedia, Ethan weeps openly for SVG

So Adobe and Macromedia have taken the corporate conjugal plunge, with the former acquiring the latter (Adobe’s press release, Macromedia’s press release). I’m sure the coming days hours are going to see plenty of hand-wringing around the company’s new product line. Fireworks vs. Photoshop, Illustrator vs. Freehand, ColdFusion vs. Mothra—get ready for the wild and rampant speculation.

<jwz>I, for one, welcome our new cyber-pundit overlords.</jwz>

But to add my own voice to the inquiring chorus, I’m a little more interested in how this whole shebang is going to affect Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Given that we don’t (yet) have widespread, native browser support for SVG, Adobe’s rarely-updated SVG Viewer was the way to work with this scriptable, vector-based, open document format. Now that Adobe now owns the Microsoft Word of vector formats, I wonder if that sound we just heard is SVG’s last gasping breath.

So, in short: welcome to the world of the übercorp! Everything is shiny and doubleplusnew…we simply ask that you leave your open graphics format at the door. Many thanks, citizen.

I just adore uninformed and baseless speculation, don’t you? Welcome to the circus of inanity that is sidesh0w.com.

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