On the eve of MacWorld, Adobe Systems Inc has acquired the assets of GoLive Systems Inc, the Menlo Park, California-based web design software tools firm, on undisclosed terms. The amount paid is not expected to significantly impact the company’s bottom line. GoLive, founded in 1996, was one of the last generation of companies to develop its initial product set exclusively for the Macintosh. Its CyberStudio professional web design package came on the market in 1997 as a competitor to Adobe’s own PageMill product. The Personal Edition of CyberStudio clashes directly with PageMill, and Adobe said it would be evaluating which technologies to keep over the next few weeks. Meanwhile, CyberStudio Professional will be added to Adobe’s other professional tools, such as PhotoShop, ImageReady, ImageStyler, Illustrator and Acrobat to give it a full suite of web design and publishing tools. Adobe will also move the product over to Intel- based Windows and NT systems. More recently, GoLive has been working to surround CyberStudio with a full scale web publishing system that also includes a browser-based word processor application called CyberWriter, and a content and asset management server component called CyberServer, which runs on Linux, AIX, Sun Solaris and Windows 95 and NT as well as MacOs. That application had been expected to emerge by the end of last year, but is currently still under development. Adobe spokesperson Linda White said the product was very strategic to Adobe. An internal content management project already working within Adobe was print-focused rather than web-focused, she said. GoLive has offices in Hamburg, Germany; Tempe, Arizona; and Austin, Texas. Adobe’s arch-rival Quark Systems Inc is also interested in content management. Last year it acquired Coris Inc for its content management software (CI No 3,350), and has been working with Sun Microsystems Inc on a Solaris version of its QuarkDMS Digital Media System (CI No 3,489). Also yesterday, Adobe introduced version 4.0 of its After Effects visual effects package, and a new bundle of products called Dynamic Media Studio, consisting of integrated versions of After Effects, Premiere, PhotoShop and Illustrator.
