Opinion: While the big merger announced Monday may seem at first blush to be about ending the competition between rival graphics applications, there's huge potential for PDF.Adobe and Macromedia plan to merge. That's an interesting notion, when one considers that very few pieces of software are more widely distributed than Adobe Reader. In acquiring Flash Player, Adobe now owns one of them.
That makes CEO Bruce Chizen—not, contrary to popular belief, Howard Stern—the would-be King of All Media.
At times over the years, the two companies have fought in heated rivalries. Who can forget the blood-and-guts Illustrator-versus-FreeHand battles for the designer's dollar in the 1990s? For the most part, however, they've co-existed peacefully.
The last bump in the road came mid-2003, when Flashpaper, an element of Macromedia Contribute 2, looked as though it might give PDF a challenge: While it was simple, Flashpaper seemed sleek, elegant and much less clunky than PDF for uploading documents to the Web.
A subset of Flash, the format never caught on in a huge way. Macromedia adopted an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" philosophy and provided a means to deploy PDF and Flashpaper together in subsequent versions of Contribute.
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Now that Macromedia and Adobe are under the same corporate roof, though, the fun begins for PDF. You'd think that the merger—which will take place this fall, if things go as planned—would be all about combining competing multimedia applications.
But knowing that Acrobat has become lead dog in the Adobe revenue kennel, it was no surprise that in the press release announcing the merger Chizen didn't mention applications such as Director, DreamWeaver, Premiere or GoLive, but instead spoke of the "complementary functionality of PDF and Flash."
Yeah, that's right. It's all about us. So how exactly does Adobe-Macromedia benefit PDF?
Is there such a thing as "more ubiquitous?" When you update your Flash Player, guess what? Maybe you should update Reader, too. And vice versa. Reminders should pop up every time either is downloaded; one company owning both pieces of software will help maintain current versions of both out there on nearly every computer hooked up to the Internet. This surely will help cut down on incompatibility headaches, such as when a user takes advantage of Acrobat 7 features in a PDF but a recipient using Reader 3 can't use them. The increased access to everyone's computer also offers the side benefit of making Bill Gates writhe in envy.
Web PDFs could get smaller. The theory of Flashpaper is great: Get paper documents to the Web in no time flat, and the files are microscopic. There are many uses for a quick-and-dirty technology for users who really need to get a sheet or two of static paper up on the Web. Anyone who's had to suffer through a 5MB PDF download just to read a stupid two-page interoffice missive understands the principle.
Mobile PDFs could become usable. Can the engineering brain trust of a combined Adobe and Macromedia finally make e-books, maps and manuals decipherable on something smaller than a laptop screen? They can be deployed today, sure, but they could be made much more useful. If this crew can't do it, it's just not possible.
Multimedia PDFs could get robust. And here's the big one: Macromedia dominates the video and audio stage. Adobe dominates the parallel universe of text and graphics. People who use Macromedia apps want to more easily integrate PDF documents into their presentations. PDF creatives want to simplify implementing video and audio in their files and turn them into must-see content. That's going to happen.
It's a long process that will probably take a couple years before we see much difference. First the two companies have to please the stockholders and the feds by making the merger plan work on paper. Then, a couple new revs of the key applications need to make their way out into the market. After that, people have to figure out how to use all the new features they get in the box.
But just imagine seamless integration of Flash and PDF. I, for one, can't wait to see the rich-media creations that eventually will come out of this merger. On my iPod or cell phone LCD.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
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