Andreas Pfeiffer

Over the past weeks, I have heard many questions about the impending mergerof Adobe and Macromedia, and the most frequent one is, “What does this mean for the publishing market?” The quick answer to this is “probably not very much.” The merger makes obvious sense from a corporate consolidation standpoint, no doubt about that, but […]

As Apples iPod shows, success in technology today has less and less to do with features, and more and more to do with ease of use. The iPod was never sold on the grounds of its technical merits: Apple hit a gold mine by marketing a cool new way of integrating music into your life. […]

Weblogs, Podcasts and video blogs have one thing in common, and that commonality explains their phenomenal success: They allow the creative individual to express him or herself with minimal technical overhead. Lets face it: Production values in our modern, super-sophisticated media environment have become such that it usually takes a small army and the gross […]

True revolutions start at the fringe, not at the center. Steve Jobs already showed that he understood this concept when he made the original iPod a cool way of listening to music for the hip few, rather than starting immediately by trying to produce an MP3 player for the masses. The iPod started its career […]

Before getting down to the more interesting stuff, lets get one thing out of the way: In my humble opinion, Apples move to Intel processorsseems quite coherent from a hardware perspective. As a Mac user since 1984, I have lived through every step of the Macintosh hardware saga, and it is sad to say, the […]

Technology providers very often live in a dream world where it is enough to bring a new feature or program to the market to push the envelope of how professionals go about their work. In all fairness, there is some historical foundation for this. Desktop publishing was a home run. Enthusiastic users adopted Photoshop before […]

When Microsoft announced its plans for the “PDF killer” Metro, a lot of thought was given to the likelihood (or not) of this format becoming a credible alternative to Adobes solidly installed PDF format. It is true that the announcement, which came in the wake of Adobes merger plans with Macromedia, clearly pitted Microsoft against […]

Launched 18 months ago into an already fairly mature software market, the first release of Adobes Creative Suite was a runaway success. The integration of all of the different software elements Adobe provides to the design and publishing market into a bigger and better whole was clearly an idea whose time had come. Although Adobe […]

There is no doubt that if you are looking to create design-rich, immersive content on the Web, Macromedias Flash technology is the way to go. The Flash player is by now installed on the vast majority of computers connected to the Internet. Macromedia cites an astounding 98 percent market share for its player software, compared […]

Since the advent of online media, traditional media such as books, magazines and newspapers have had a hard time. Advertising revenues have fallen off, readership for established titles has declined or shown little growth, and some newly established outlets for text-centric media, such as e-books, have not really lived up to their promise. Yet, paradoxically, […]