Macromedia, Inc.

Macromedia, Inc. was an American graphics, multimedia, and web-development software company, founded in 1992 through the merger of Authorware Inc. and MacroMind–Paracomp. It was headquartered at 601 Townsend Street in San Francisco, California, and traded on Nasdaq under the ticker MACR. It operated as an independent public company until Adobe Systems acquired it in a stock swap announced April 18, 2005 and completed December 3, 2005, valued at roughly $3.4 billion. Per Adobe's April 2005 corporate fact sheet, Macromedia had approximately 1,500 employees and revenue of about $422 million in calendar year 2004.

Its product lines covered web authoring and multimedia development: Director (interactive multimedia authoring) and Shockwave; Authorware (interactive learning); Dreamweaver (HTML/web authoring); Flash and the Flash Player browser plugin; Fireworks; FreeHand (vector illustration, acquired via Altsys); and ColdFusion, its application server, added through the 2001 acquisition of Allaire. By the early 2000s the company reported more than 20 products and roughly 30 offices in 13 countries.

Litigation posture: this is an operating company, not a non-practicing entity. The single tracked case — Macromedia, Inc. v. Adobe Systems, Inc., filed 2001-10-19 in the Northern District of California (San Francisco Division) — is a plaintiff action by a product company asserting its own patents against a direct competitor. The plaintiff/defendant split (1/0) reflects only this database's coverage, not Macromedia's full litigation history; contemporaneous reporting shows a two-way dispute in which Adobe sued Macromedia in August 2000 over its "tabbed palette" patent, Macromedia countersued in September 2000, and Macromedia filed the tracked October 2001 suit. Venue was the Northern District of California, the parties' home district, not a plaintiff-friendly forum such as the Eastern District of Texas.

Context: the tracked case concerned two Macromedia patents (the '299 "draw-based editor for web pages" and '145 hierarchical structure editor patents, acquired from NetObjects shortly before filing) asserted against Adobe GoLive and Photoshop. A jury awarded Macromedia $4.9 million in its 2000 counterclaim and Adobe $2.8 million in its original action; the companies settled their patent disputes in July 2002.