When you inhabit a market populated by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle — and yes, include Google in the mix — there's no sense thinking small. So it was that Adobe chief executive Bruce Chizen earlier this spring engineered a $3.4bn (£1.9bn) deal to buy Macromedia.
It's an imaginative combination that brings the maker of Flash animation software together with the creators of the PDF technology for presenting text files online. What with content developers hungry for new tools to use in the fast-changing world of multimedia, Adobe has set up a near-impregnable position.
At least on paper.
This sort of stuff is notoriously tricky, and the history of the software industry is littered with the detritus that remains from once grand ambitions gone astray — the most famous failure being Ray Noorda's quixotic attempt to refashion Novell by acquiring companies he believed would help him battle Microsoft on several different fronts. Novell has never recovered.
Chizen says he knows what he's up against and remains convinced that the Macromedia acquisition was the right move for both companies. ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com recently met with Chizen to talk about the business and how he views the evolution of the technology world.
Q: Certain investors filed suit after the Macromedia announcement. What can you say about the lawsuit?
A: We think it is totally frivolous and has no merit whatsoever. I can't comment further on it, but customers, the investors, everybody, were asking what took us so long to do the deal. It was so obvious.
Well, not everyone. For whatever it's worth, we heard Jim Cramer on his CNBC show, and he didn't sound thrilled.
Yeah, but other than Jim? If you read most of the sites and most of the blogs, there's the usual concern with customers asking whether we still will maintain their product after the merger.
A lot of the concern has to do with the integration of the two companies into one. This is probably the trickiest merger that you guys are attempting to consummate since Aldus.
From a financial perspective, yes. But...
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