Macromedia

Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software company (1992–2005) headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and controls the line of Macromedia products.

History

Macromedia originated in the 1992 merger of Authorware Inc. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind-Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director).
Director, an interactive multimedia-authoring tool used to make CD-ROMs and information kiosks, served as 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^{[citation needed]} it also needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools. CompuServe was the first company to integrate Shockwave. In October 1995, Macromedia licensed Sun's Java Programming Language; Sun worked with Macromedia to integrate Java in Macromedia's multimedia software. By 2002 Macromedia produced more than 20 products and had 30 offices in 13 different countries.^[1]

Acquisitions

In January 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys Corporation after Adobe Systems announced a merger with Altsys’ business partner, the Aldus Corporation.^[2] Altsys was the developer of the vector-drawing program, FreeHand, which had been licensed by Aldus for marketing and sales. On account of the competition with the similar Adobe Illustrator, the Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint of Adobe Systems on October 18, 1994 ordering a divestiture of FreeHand back to Altsys.^[3] With Macromedia’s acquisition of Altsys, it received FreeHand thus expanding its product line of multimedia graphics software to include illustration and design graphics software. FreeHand's vector graphics rendering engine and other software components within the program would prove useful to Macromedia in the development of technologies to support its web strategy.
To jumpstart its web strategy further^{[citation needed]}, Macromedia made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool which FutureWave Software had originally developed 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 most users, at the time, 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.^[4] 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.