Monday, March 26, 2018

Adobe to discontinue Muse and Business Catalyst

Today Adobe announced that Adobe Muse and Adobe Business Catalyst will not be developed any further. I’m saddened by this, as I used both products, and believe they filled a specific niche in the industry. But apparently that niche wasn’t profitable or worth pursuing for Adobe.

Muse:

"On March 26, 2018 we will release the final feature improvement release of Adobe Muse. We will continue to offer technical support to all active Creative Cloud customers until May 20, 2019.” Read more here.

It appears that Adobe is considering extending Adobe Spark to allow creation of full Websites:

"Adobe Spark, powered by 30+ years of Adobe’s design intelligence, will soon bring a better way to build websites. Create beautiful, modular, and responsive websites from scratch—in minutes. Just add your text, photos, videos and more, and Spark will give you beautiful results.” Read more here. Oddly, there is no mention of, or link to, this effort in the Muse announcement.

Business Catalyst:

"Adobe is committed to delivering exceptional software and services to our customers. It’s in our nature to innovate and try new things, and it was in this spirit that we acquired Business Catalyst in 2009. As we re-focus on products that broadly provide our customers with the most value, Adobe is announcing the end of development for Business Catalyst as of March 26th, 2018. New sites will no longer be available for purchase starting with June 18th, 2018.  

Adobe will stop hosting existing sites on Business Catalyst on March 26th, 2020. Adobe encourages customers to download their data and migrate to other systems well before March 26th, 2020. Detailed how-to information and assistance is available. Customers' data will be retained by Adobe until March 26th, 2020, after which date the data will be deleted. Data retention is for the sole purpose of allowing customers to export their data and transfer to another platform.” Read more here. 

2 comments:

stevehall52 said...

This is an insult to Creative Cloud subscribers. While Adobe Muse may not be perfect -- and requires 3rd party plugins to work well -- it's still part of the Creative Cloud family of products.

While it may be a great product, I don't know a soul that builds sites with Dreamweaver [with apologies to DW users]. XD CC has been touted as a replacement, but doesn't have the publishing features of Muse.

Creative Cloud products are in use every day at my company, and I rely on Adobe to give me reliable, consistent support for software that they release. That Adobe "continues to re-focus on developing products and solutions that provide our customers with the most value" is simply corporate gibberish. Muse provides value to me and my customers.

I'm not about the cancel my CC subscription. Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat are too valuable. But this will make me seriously question their future commitment -- and my commitment as well -- to second tier software releases [XD? DW? Spark?]

As subscribers we deserve better. If anyone has an inside track with senior management at Adobe, please ask them to reconsider.

Rashel Ahmed said...

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