What's to Become of My Bits?

Computer users ask this question once they have a relationship with a program. Everything changes in life, everything ends. For some of us it seems just as serious to lose a creative tool, or an engine of their career, as losing a friend.

So when Adobe announced it's buying its rival Macromedia for $3.4 billion, users of both companies' products asked the question above. Macromedia's users of drawing programs like Fireworks expect the Adobe juggernaut — Photoshop, Illustrator and the like — to run roughly over their favored tools. Meanwhile, some of us Adobe customers are looking over our shoulders at one of Macromedia's market successes, Dreamweaver. It looks like that product could overshadow our little GoLive program, Adobe's tool that builds Web pages.

Software can outlast a lot of things we buy today: digital cameras, minivans. I've got suits that're older than some of my software, but I don't keep them because they still fit. I have a big enough closet to house some optimism about the future of my physique. I also have a CD player still spinning the discs after 16 years, an item only slightly less amazing than our 22-year-old fridge. Things that last long are more prized than they used to be, because they're more rare.

Consolidation is the credo in the modern software industry, however, which makes even a fit product another candidate for the dustbin. Buying out your competition is an old business model, but it seems like the software bit business has more buyout fever than any other.

Really, can you imagine your favorite car maker being gobbled up by its competitor, eliminating the brand of car you love? Ford bought Volvo, sure, but it didn't erase the safe models Volvo used to define itself. Adobe bought Macromedia, an event like Black & Decker buying the Craftsman line and then removing half the tools from the Craftsman lineup.

We care because we use software to mimic who we are and how we create. Spend enough hours with GoLive while you create Web pages, or with Dreamweaver, and you struggle to change your tools. One GoLive user wrote me:

"When Dreamweaver first appeared on the scene, I have it a look and found it severely lacking. Since then, I’ve given Dreamweaver another chance to win me over every year or so. Each time, I came away puzzled by the ever-growing marketshare/mindshare of Dreamweaver."

He goes on to describe his latest attempt to use the competiting tool, and how he "hit a wall," adding that "I didn’t get any further with this Dreamweaver experiment than previous times. I’m worried the next time I won’t have any choice."

I worry too, but maybe not as much as those full-time Web developers. More than once in the last two years of cutting Web pages I've grown convinced that something's got to be easier to use than GoLive on my Mac. Comments like the one above don't make me feel so certain, however.

Dreamweaver users see their bigger market share as proof enough of product superiority. A story on a Ziff-Davis site about the merger included a user comment that “Hopefully, Adobe will be smart and recognize the market share of Dreamweaver in addition to realizing what a powerful tool it is for Web developers.”

We Mac users hear this kind of thing a lot. It's popular (see Windows) so it must be good. Nah. It's sometimes just popular. There's a way to escape being outsold. If you build something as well as a BMW, it doesn't matter how much those Fords outsell your car. GoLive, unfortunately, is no BMW. On its best days, maybe a Mitsubishi Eclipse Spyder. (We own one like the model at left, only in red, and just love its look and driving feel. We're also waiting for enough budget to replace its broken convertible top motors, a chronic component in Spyders of 1998 vintage.)

Companies do business to profit and persevere, goals that demand they prune their tools from time to time. Losing our software bits gives us a way to get ready for life's more meaningful changes: the decline in our health, advancing age, and the loss of all that we love, eventually.