Macromedia was a North American graphics and Web development software house headquartered in San Francisco, California producing such products as Macromedia Flash. The line of Macromedia products is now controlled by its former rival, Adobe Systems, which acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005.

History

Macromedia was formed by the 1992 merger of Authorware Inc. (makers of Authorware) and MacroMind-Paracomp (makers of Macromind Director).

Director, an interactive multimedia authoring tool widely used to make CD-ROMs and information kiosks, was Macromedia's flagship product until the mid-1990s. As the CD-ROM market began to decline and the World Wide Web gained in popularity, Macromedia created Shockwave, a Director viewer plugin for Web browsers, but decided it also needed to expand its market by branching out into web-native media tools.

Acquisitions

In January of 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys for its intellectual property; in particular, FreeHand, a page layout and vector drawing program very similar to Adobe Illustrator. FreeHand's vector graphics rendering engine and other software components within the program would prove useful to Macromedia in the development of technologies to support its web strategy.

To jumpstart its web strategy further, the company made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool originally designed for pen-based computing devices. Because of the small size of the FutureSplash viewer application, it was particularly suited for download over the Web, where most users, at the time, had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to Macromedia Flash, and following the lead of Netscape, distributed the Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share. As of 2005, more computers worldwide had the Flash Player installed than any other Web media format, including Java, QuickTime, RealNetworks and Windows Media PlayerFact: date=February 2007. As Flash matured, Macromedia's focus shifted from marketing it as a graphics and media tool to promoting it as a Web application platform, adding scripting and data access capabilities to the player while attempting to retain its small footprint.

remained a strong competitor among amateur and business users.

Macromedia continued on the M&A trail and, in December 1999, it acquired traffic analysis software company Andromedia. Web development company Allaire was acquired in 2001 and Macromedia added several popular server and Web development products to its portfolio, including ColdFusion, a web application server based on the CFML language, JRun, a J2EE application server, and HomeSite, an HTML code editor that was also bundled with Dreamweaver.

In 2003, Macromedia acquired Web conferencing company Presedia and continued to develop and enhance their Flash-based online collaboration and presentation product offering under the brand Breeze. Later that year, Macromedia also acquired help authoring software company eHelp Corporation, whose products included RoboHelp & RoboDemo (Now Captivate). Many of the developers of RoboHelp went on to form MadCap Software which is a competitor in the help-authoring space.