Jim Rapoza at eWeek had an interesting suggestion in regard to the Adobe/Macromedia merger. He notes that the sorting and sifting that follows most software mergers leads to some products fading away. Some actually get a funeral but often there is simply a loss of interest. Rapoza suggests turning over these orphans to the open-source community.

This probably sounds like folly. Companies just don’t do this sort of thing. However, IBM has certainly demonstrated that moving technology to the open source community can be a valid business strategy.

I have seen an acquiring company become “a deer in the headlights”–as the cost of maintaining/enhancing a product is weighed against the cost of offending customers by killing it. The latter cost isn’t taken lightly since these customers probably license software from both companies. It is not unusual to see critical business applications and processes that have been built around the specialty tools that are most likely the targets of such “alignments”. The integration investment often significantly exceeds that of the underlying tools.

Just a few short years ago this wasn’t even an option. Perhaps Rapoza is onto something.

At the WritersUA conference last March, Macromedia cancelled participation in the trade show at the last minute. Immediately, rumors began flying (although in fairness we have to say that the Adobe/Macromedia merger was not one of the myriad conspiracy theories that emerged). Before the conference ended, a content-free Macromedia statement appeared in a RoboHelp forum at Macromedia’s site.

The apparent demise of RoboHelp matches the general industry trend over the last two years. Technical publishing groups are beginning to demand that tools support open standards (XML and XSL) that offer greater flexibility.

We are being asked to produce more and varied forms of output (beyond the basic print and online help), to share content, and to extend publishing workflows to include other departments and organizations. Software customization based upon user profiles and authorization is creating the need for user assistance that accommodates a complex matrix of variations in both feature sets and user interfaces.

These demands make a transition from proprietary solutions to open standards-based tools quite appealing. Structured authoring based on XML can address all of these requirements, and XSLT is quickly becoming a popular tool for transforming data from a broad variety of applications. This is where many of our clients are moving and we are adding classes (XSLT) and offering products (DocFrame) to meet the demand.