Frustrated by Magento? Then you’ll love
I imagine it’s a narrow sliver of folks who follow this site and don’t follow the trades, but just in case: Adobe is going to buy Magento Inc. Right now there’s the usual sound and fury you’d expect from the usual places — Magento’s relentlessly on-message machine isn’t slacking off just because their goal is in sight.
The sale doesn’t feel like much of a surprise although the buyer’s thrown folks for a loop. Sit with it a moment though, and you realize Adobe 2018 is a lot like the game company Steam — they’re innovating less in what the software does and more in how the software’s distributed and licensed. With that lens it gets a little easier to see the macroeconomic forces that made this deal happen.
For those of us on the ground level watching the skies alight and wondering if we’ll have careers in the morning? All that Magento code in the world isn’t going anywhere (yet). Keep your eyes on solving the problems and learning to manipulate the underlying technology and you’ll be OK. Anyone who claims to know the specifics of how this will play out is selling something (also guilty) but this has all happened before and will happen again.
That said — maybe it’s appropriate to shed-a-tear/pour-one-out for the Magento that might have been. With a few different personalities and a few different choices along the way, Magento might have ended up the Automattic of the ecommerce world (perhaps buying a blogging startup named WooBloviate to fill out its portfolio — alternate timelines are hard to predict). A different sort of success for sure, but it’s hard (or perhaps just dangerous) to disagree with $1.6 billion dollars.