My first copy of Fireworks I bought when it was still owned by Macromedia and it was wonderful; so powerful yet easy to use. It was my impression that Adobe never really "got" it, or knew how it should exist in their ecosystem as a sort-of competitor to their other products. It was sad watching it flounder, but I wonder what Adobe could've done differently.
I feel like Adobe never really got macromedia tools at all. They knew they wanted to own the content creation market, but they never really understood the developer side of the content creation game. Fireworks is the last Adobe tool I use these days and I'm disappointed they can never understand why someone like me would continue to use it.
Macromedia never really got (some of) Macromedia tools either. I used to work on Fireworks. I don't mean I was using it; I was building it. It was always a red-headed stepchild, though. It went through as many near-death experiences as Apple, though the outside world never heard about it. It was the only product being built in Texas, a result of MM's strategy of growing by acquisition and spinning off products to avoid antitrust problems, and one day Macromedia closed down the whole office to cut costs and laid off everyone who wouldn't move to Silicon Valley. A few (very few) came up, but since they were now here in Tech Mecca, most no longer wanted to be on the career-limiting Fireworks team anymore. People on other teams doing cosmetic cross-product UI synchronization gave Fireworks the same cosmetic makeover to make it appear to still be alive, so upgrades were sold, and eventually it gathered a few new devs and muddled through.
It always had a passionate user base, which was always very small. It, like a font editor, a sound editor, and several other products that were canceled just didn't belong in a big company, but it always just barely survived the "product layoffs"--but just barely. My guess is that the CTO, Kevin Lynch (now at Apple) was personally fond of it and wouldn't let it die but couldn't afford to feed it or pay any attention to it, either. It should have been given to a small, lifestyle software company that would have loved it, cared for it, and lived well off its meager sales.
The big problem was that the Web devs who paid for software always had Photoshop, and most assumed that anything that Fireworks could do, Photoshop could, too, so why buy and learn another photo editor? Before they acquired Macromedia, Adobe always used to spread this FUD, and after the acquisition, they couldn't afford to say anything different about such a small product.
Oh, well. This is now an opportunity for someone much smaller than Adobe to create Fireworks II for that small, passionate market.
very interesting comment , and what do you do now? Cant not you launch that FW2 product that a lot of people want ?
What's makes fireworks great is that is it people who actually extend it ( using flash or javascript ). Photoshop is a lot more difficult to extend. Also Fireworks is easier to use for webdev.
Adobe's own online presence is a prime example of how they don't understand the web.
Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription.
And I'm not trying to brag there. I'm meaning to say that it's ridiculous how slow they have moved. I've never met a person who didn't agree with the above.
I wonder how many students would've shelled out 20 bucks a month instead of downloading Adobe's software illegally if they'd done this sooner.
>Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription.
How is that a substantiated argument?
Tons of people say otherwise -- that they won't go with this new model.
And 10 years ago (when nobody was doing it, so it was even more alien, and internet speeds were lower) a lot more people would have hated it too.
As a student, I still feel like their subscription model needs work. $20 a month is too much for a single application, especially when it requires a year-long commitment. $30 for the academic subscription is a good deal because it includes everything, but I only use a few of the programs. Again, this option requires a year-long commitment.
For an educational license, I'd gladly pay $10 for Photoshop. For a commercial license, I'd pay $20, but only if I could cancel at any time.
It does, but before the subscription program, I wouldn't be surprised if 98% of users had pirated copies.
The subscription fees are much more reasonable, but I'd be astonished if the rate of piracy has changed more than a few percentage points.
I wonder if lowering the price to something around $9.99 or $14.99 and dropping the annual contract would grow the user base enough to increase overall revenue.
I got started designing websites using FW MX 2004 before I graduated to writing CSS first. The ability to mockup designs and then use the slice export feature was great fun. I love Fireworks.
Sadly, all of Macromedia products didn't have place in ADobe ecosystem except Flash. Fireworks, Director, and my favorite Freehand. FH11, we had so much fun and productive times together! Only did I switch fully (mentally) to Illustrator with CS4.
As a long time Flash and Director user before going Unity, Director was dropped by Adobe the day it was bought. It has been on EOL since the aquisition. They had the lead on 3d on the web then and they let it slip. There have been no real updates to Director since 9 when Macromedia still had a hand in it. The recent releases were just to make people think it was still alive, no big loss except for Adobe and market share.
Freehand was awesome and Fireworks will be missed, it's too bad Macromedia did get bought by Adobe really, things would be so different. It was great for competition and Flash would have gone native and hardware accelerated much earlier.
