Macromedia

In January 1995, Macromedia acquired Altsys for its intellectual property; in particular, FreeHand, a page layout and vector drawing program very similar to Adobe Illustrator. FreeHand's vector graphics rendering engine and other software components within the program would prove useful to Macromedia in the development of technologies to support its web strategy.

To jumpstart its web strategy further, the company made two acquisitions in 1996. First, Macromedia acquired FutureWave Software, makers of FutureSplash Animator, an animation tool originally designed for pen-based computing devices. Because of the small size of the FutureSplash viewer application, it was particularly suited for download over the Web, where most users, at the time, had low-bandwidth connections. Macromedia renamed Splash to Macromedia Flash, and following the lead of Netscape, distributed the Flash Player as a free browser plugin in order to quickly gain market share.

Also in 1996, Macromedia acquired iBand Software, makers of the fledgling Backstage HTML authoring tool and application server. Macromedia developed a new HTML authoring tool, Macromedia Dreamweaver, around portions of the Backstage codebase and released the first version in 1997. At the time, most professional web authors preferred to code HTML by hand using text editors because they wanted full control over the source.

Macromedia continued on the M&A trail and, in December 1999, it acquired traffic analysis software company Andromedia Corporation. Web development company Allaire was acquired in 2001 and Macromedia added several popular server and Web development products to its portfolio, including ColdFusion, a web application server based on the CFML language, JRun, a J2EE application server, and HomeSite, an HTML code editor that was also bundled with Dreamweaver.