Adobe Shockwave - Branding and Name Confusion

Branding and Name Confusion

In an attempt to raise its brand profile all Macromedia players prefixed Shockwave to their names in the late 1990s. Although this campaign was successful and helped establish Shockwave Flash as a multimedia plugin, Shockwave and Flash became more difficult to maintain as separate products. In 2005, Macromedia marketed three distinct browser player plugins under the brand names Macromedia Authorware, Macromedia Shockwave, and Macromedia Flash.

Macromedia also released a web browser plug-in for viewing Macromedia FreeHand files online. It was branded Macromedia Shockwave for FreeHand and displayed specially compressed .fhc Freehand files.

Later, with the acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe Systems slowly began to rebrand all products related to Shockwave.