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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Early 2000s Adobe was stacked with web technology. They knew where the world was headed, but didn't quite capture it the right way.

Flash, Shockwave, Dreamweaver, Macromedia Homesite, Fireworks, Coldfusion, Adobe AIR, LiveMotion, Actionscript 3.0, MXML, Flex.

They shipped so much software, it's incredible.

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Macromedia is really where to point most of that admiration IMO. Most of the products you list were developed there and then Adobe bought the company.

Jeremy Allaire somehow flies under the radar as an impactful tech entrepreneur, but look at this resume: Allaire Corp, Macromedia, Brightcove, Circle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Allaire

What's even more interesting is when you look at some of those tools, many of them were actually way more straightforward to use to design websites without much coding than what we have today. Just like how we had all those CRUD rapid app development tools that would build the app for you just from a database model (Access, PowerBuilder, Delphi, FoxPro...). While what we have today is arguably way more powerful, we've lost some of that simplicity (at least for more trivial use cases) along the way.

I always felt like Adobe‘s big problem was they were fixated on trying to adapt any web technology to work for print designers, that any design should fit in a certain window size or resolution. This worked ok until mobile devices hit a certain tipping point and the idea of responsive design became king. They didn’t know how to handle that, and the tools fell way behind.

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