Adobe buys Serious Magic

[Billy]

Got this email today:

Dear Serious Magic Customer,
I have some exciting news to share. As of today, October 19, 2006 Adobe Systems Incorporated has acquired Serious Magic.
This is a fantastic opportunity for both companies to join together to deliver award-winning video software to help creative professionals, businesses, consumers, and educators communicate better. Over our nearly six year history Serious Magic has developed several uniquely powerful technologies. We're particularly excited because now these technologies, as well as our award-winning products, can reach a much larger worldwide audience. I view it as gaining a dramatically larger stage for the magic we've built to play on.
Moving forward, you should continue to contact Serious Magic sales and support for Serious Magic products and solutions. For more information about the acquisition, please visit http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/.
Myself and most of the Serious Magic team are continuing with Adobe and the future looks very bright indeed. We're proud of the cutting-edge work we've done so far at Serious Magic and believe that teaming with Adobe will be a truly magical combination.
Sincerely,
Mark Randall
CEO and Chief Magician
Sucks.

Adobe gobbles up another product and will assimilate it into their weird, hard to understand, unintuitive, time wasting interface.

[ssvp]

I knew it! I saw Adobe spotlighting DV Rack last week on the their website.. Now it makes sense..:)

[Daniel Runyon]

My goodness, can anyone hold back from selling out to Borgs? MySpace to Rupert, YouTube to Google, Hunt's to ConAgra (sure, been a while but still), Sonic Foundry to Sony (personal ouch) and every dang candy maker to Canada... why can't people either be happy with the plenty they have and not sacrifice cool things to assholes or want to get out of the business and sell to someone with soul who will maintain the product properly?

Adobe has already done some less than awesome things to Dreamweaver that may or may not have happened anyway but they for sure happened after they got em so they get the blame. And I will never update beyond version 5 of the Acrobat Reader as the new ones pipe in ads. As near as I can tell the only things Adobe has ever done that were solidly sweet was Photoshop and providing Edmonton Alberta with Premier 6.5/After Effects.

[RatVega]

My goodness, can anyone hold back from selling out to Borgs? MySpace to Rupert, YouTube to Google, Hunt's to ConAgra (sure, been a while but still), Sonic Foundry to Sony (personal ouch) and every dang candy maker to Canada... why can't people either be happy with the plenty they have and not sacrifice cool things to assholes or want to get out of the business and sell to someone with soul who will maintain the product properly?

Adobe has already done some less than awesome things to Dreamweaver that may or may not have happened anyway but they for sure happened after they got em so they get the blame. And I will never update beyond version 5 of the Acrobat Reader as the new ones pipe in ads. As near as I can tell the only things Adobe has ever done that were solidly sweet was Photoshop and providing Edmonton Alberta with Premier 6.5/After Effects.

While I share some of your sentiments, I see all of this as part of the "reconsolidation" of the NLE market... Things have changed a lot over the last few years; Apple snatched up several prime pieces of technology that re-appeared in the Final Cut Studio offering, Avid picked up Pinnacle to shore up their lower-end offering, Sony made acquisitions to flesh out their Vegas suite. I think Adobe has suffered form all this and felt that they needed to strengthen their offering as well. How well each entity uses their acquisitions will determine their future success.

Inevitably someone loses in each change and others gain. When Apple took over the India Titler Pro product, all the FCP uses got LiveType and PC users got an end-of-life announcement and a fare-the-well. Similar scenarios accompany most acquisitions.

To the subject of the acquisition, all this can be either a Godsend or proof of business problems that go beyond engineering. I imagine that the guys at Pinnacle were a bit relieved when they became part of Avid.

If there's a really telling aspect to this sort of thing, it's on the other side; what will happen to the players who can't/don't make acquisitions. They lose out on what has to be seen as an excellent, fluid engineering talent pool. The little guys (at least those with talent) by their nature work harder to "get it right" and tend to try to serve a wider market.