Brand aquired, brand destroyed.

What can happen with a brand acquisition? For one, if the acquisition brand is generally less successful than the purchasing brand, then more resources are placed into the development of the failing brand in order to help it realize its potential in the marketplace. Now what happened with Adobe acquiring Macromedia? It sounded brilliant from the start, as Flash was promised to be compatible with Illustrator and vice versa. You will also be able to purchase Flash as a member of the CS3 family as opposed to making an entirely separate purchase. However, these promises were not realized.

One of my hobbies lies in game design. I used to draw my characters in illustrator and then transfer them to Flash to outline them, using its superior drawing tools. I was excited at the fact that I could now directly transfer “ready to animate” images from illustrator. To my dismay, the transfer led to a horrid display of jagged line work, misplaced gradients, and five times the anchor points as originally placed. Fine. No big deal. So what if compatibility issues were not addressed, as I could still try out the brilliant, easy to use, and most innovative Actionscript 3.0. For those who don’t use Flash, Actionscript is the nifty language that can be applied into an animation to make it do cool things like applying physics ratios to objects to make them bounce a certain way, or even inserting a function that allows you to move an object using the simple press of a key.

Unfortunately, my etiquette with regards to Actionscripting was fairly non apparent, as all of my Flash abilities were self-taught from a conglomeration of quickly keyed and “noob directed” tutorials. When I had decided to tell a simple object to move right when the right key was pressed, I was greeted by a message stating my methods were outdated and improper.

I was not allowed to assign actions directly to movie clips, because it was bad format. Flash simply recommended that I insert it into key frames instead as “most animators do”. I had to downgrade to Actionscript 2.0 in order to still be able to communicate with one of my favourite programs. But what does this have to do with Adobe’s brand acquisitions? I had done a little research and discovered that the previous Macromedia team under Adobe’s innovative guidance developed Actionscript 3.0. What a disaster.