Pervasive Software Inc has announced Tango Objects for Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 2 professional web authoring environment. Developers can now use Dreamweaver to interact with EveryWare Inc’s Tango web application server. But the Tango Objects themselves are less significant to Macromedia than why they were developed, executives say. Once an Apple Macintosh- oriented CD-ROM development tools company with an uncertain future, Macromedia has remade itself in the image of the web.
Director of product marketing for Dreamweaver Beth Burke Davis boasts that Macromedia’s stock price has more than tripled in the last year, a far cry from the days when the company’s shares reflected doubt about its direction. Thanks to licensing deals with the browser companies, more than 100 million people can now view web content through Flash, a vector-based multimedia player. That’s an estimated 78% of everyone browsing the web. Java – often considered the lowest common denominator for multimedia content – can only claim 62%, with QuickTime and Real Networks languishing even further behind.
Dreamweaver’s success is not quite so startling, but is still solid. Macromedia claims 68% of the professional web authoring market for the platform. Little wonder that Pervasive and EveryWare are lining up to interoperate. If its numbers bear any relation to the truth, Macromedia products amount to a de facto industry standard for multimedia content on the web.
