Macromedia completes Allaire merger

They love each other, they really do

By Kieren McCarthy, 23rd March 2001

Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Backup/Recovery

Macromedia and Allaire have completed their merger and announced their love-in with an extremely brief press release and a cheesy interview with the heads of each company.

The official release, on Macromedia's site, says little. Merger with Allaire - leading provider of software - completed. The deal will bring "together market-leading server, development and playback software to make building professional Web sites more efficient, affordable, and accessible" etc etc. This is apparently all summed up in the magic words: "what the web can be".

Allaire is a little more excited: "We are very excited to announce that the merger transaction between Macromedia and Allaire has closed...Throughout the coming months, we will be working on the integration of the operations." And so on and so forth.

They don't seem too keen - or plain just don't know - on explaining what they're going to do now they're bed-buddies. Fortunately there is an interview with Kevin Lynch of Macromedia and Jeremy Allaire of Allaire (he will become Macromedia's CTO). Will this shed any light? Well, dig through the vomit-inducing ego-stroking as you'll find this: "In the long term, we plan to deliver a new generation of application framework technology that leverages our server platform, Macromedia and Allaire visual tools, and the ubiquitous Macromedia Flash player." Warmer.

Lynch: "I believe this is really about the marriage of these two user communities, bringing the developers and designers together so they can more easily build the Web sites of tomorrow." Colder.

Lynch: "We also see the nature of the Internet changing as users access Web content and applications through a range of devices. This will pose many challenges for developers and designers, and we want to help them be successful in delivering really great user experiences across all these devices in a very efficient way."

Is that clear then? No? Well that's all you're gonna get.