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Technology Stocks : Macromedia...making a comeback? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (2473)	5/26/1999 10:18:00 AM
From: Allen champ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2675

Posted 25/05/99 3:43pm by Tony Smith Macromedia to free Flash Web graphics specialist Macromedia is to freely licence its Flash Player's source code, but it's not yet clear whether the move will embrace the open sourcer movement. Macromedia bought Flash technology a few years ago and has been promoting it as a de facto standard for animated vector graphics on the Web ever since, with some success. However, Macromedia's chief competitor, Adobe, has been working its own Web vector graphics format, Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and by working with the W3C, IBM, Sun and Microsoft, has ensured that SVG is likely to become the official standard for XML vector graphics. And being XML-based, SVG graphics can be code straight onto the page -- you don't need to download binaries as you do with Flash. As Web sites move from HTML to XML, that's going to favour SVG over Flash, unless Macromedia can widen its usage, and that's what the free licensing is all about -- and, indeed, its attempts to persuade us that every Web user and their dog has downloaded Flash Player. The company's plan appears to follow Sun's approach with Java. Anyone who wants to support Flash in their software or hardware will be granted free access to the source code. To what extent the licence terms will permit developers to modify the code and post their own Flash Players, as they would under a true open source licensing programme, remains to be seen. The terms will be released when Macromedia ships the Flash SDK "later this year" -- probably in the summer, when the next version is due. ®

To: Mohan Marette who wrote (2473)	5/26/1999 1:53:00 PM
From: Scott Kessler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2675

Make no mistake about, MACR is a software co. pinning its hopes to to the promise of Net. In this way, MACR is much like ADBE, INTU & RNWK. All are software cos. that are using the Net to increase revenues & revenue growth. I've liked MACR very much & got in after the pullback from $53 to $42 (more than 20%!). The interesting thing about MACR is that, yes, they have nearly a monopoly position in software that makes for rich media content (animation, etc.) on the Web (Java can do some of this stuff), and yes, shockwave.com is coming, but the stock trades @ a very reasonable fwd. p/e multiple (39), especially for a "Net" stock w/ expected 5-yr. growth of 32%. Once broadband is more widely deployed, I could see this stock moving akin to how RNWK surged from the teens to ridiculous heights. Short-term, I see some analyst upgrades & EPS estimates after the recent announcements & user event.