Adobe Freehand
On April 18, 2005, Adobe Systems announced an agreement to acquire Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion. The Department of Justice regulated the transaction that came 10 years after the Federal Trade Commission’s 1994 ruling which barred Adobe from acquiring FreeHand. The acquisition took place on December 3, 2005, and Adobe integrated the companies' operations, networks, and customer-care organizations shortly thereafter. Adobe acquired FreeHand along with the entire Macromedia product line that included Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks but not including Fontographer, which FontLab Ltd. licensed with an option to buy all rights to. Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia cast doubt on the future of FreeHand, primarily because of Adobe's competing product, Illustrator. Adobe announced in May 2006 that it planned to continue to support FreeHand and develop it "based on customers' needs". One year later on May 15, 2007, Adobe said that it would discontinue development and updates to the program and the company would provide tools and support to ease the transition to Illustrator. In a 2008 interview with Senior Product Manager of Illustrator, Terry Hemphill, he told FreeHand users: “FreeHand is not going to be revived; time to move on, really. The Illustrator team is making a determined effort to bring the best of FreeHand into Illustrator, which should be evident from some of the new features in CS4.”
Read more about this topic: Macromedia Free Hand, History