
Adobe to Acquire Magento - uptown
https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/adobe-to-acquire-magento
======
muxator
Ah, Magento.

It's "smart" EAV[0] Database schema gave my colleagues so much good time. I do
not know how it became in more recent versions, but at the time I distinctly
remember them dealing with abysmal DB performances and completely gibberish
auto-generated queries.

In one case, I had to manually dig through the DB and write an ad-hoc query to
extract data that was needed for reporting, otherwise the software would start
doing a gazillion of round trips between a DB lookup, an AS-level computation,
another DB lookup...

That DB design tasted of super-mega-premature optimization, in which the
developers wanted to guarantee extensibility at all costs, foregoing in the
process the design of an actual data model.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity%E2%80%93attribute%E2%80%93value_model)

~~~
tomc1985
My first impression looking at their schema was, "what the fuck? if they
wanted MongoDB why the fuck didnt they just go with MongoDB?"

Thanks to Magento I can add "someone tried to turn MySQL into a typeless K-V
document store" to the list of crazy things that I've seen.

~~~
fipar
Since at this time you seem to be the first user of the f word on this thread,
it seems like a good time to say that me and a lot of my database friends and
colleagues use Magento as a replacement for it. So you could rewrite that bit
of your comment as "what the Magento?" and it would not lose meaning for us!

~~~
tomc1985
Hilarious! I am so stealing that.

------
mychael
I've never met anyone who uses Magento that actually likes it.

~~~
cepth
As the saying goes, compare Magento to the alternatives, not to the almighty.

If you're running an ecommerce operation that is too small to justify building
a custom CMS, and can't justify paying for Demandware/Salesforce Commerce
Cloud, your options are really limited.

Shopify and Big Commerce offer good out of the box functionality, but you are
then stuck with their feature sets and pricing tables. Each platform taxes you
in various ways. Shopify imposes 0.5-2.0% fees on transactions processed with
external credit card processors. Big Commerce forces you to upgrade your plan
after your sales exceed a certain threshold.

For even ecommerce companies doing several million dollars a year in revenue,
Magento community edition (open source) is sufficient. You pay up front for
development or design work, pay annual server costs, and can scale your
ecommerce technology spend on your schedule.

Magento has given me extreme headaches at times, but once we had our site up
and running it was easy to maintain and administer. The non-technical people,
i.e. the people who are actually packing and shipping orders, quickly picked
up using the admin panel. So, yeah, I like Magento just fine.

~~~
wila
So far the only somewhat sane alternative is prestashop.

At least I don't worry what breaks this time on a security update, which is a
real PITA with magento. For updates to magento shops I schedule time, for
updates to prestashop I press a button..

~~~
cepth
We actually used to run our site off of Prestashop. The biggest reason that I
saw to switch was because of the lack of integrations with some of our
operations tech stack. For example, Freshdesk has an official extension/add-on
for Magento, but on PrestaShop the only add-on is a $39.99 option made by a
3rd party developer.

Prestashop is probably easier to administer than Magento, but that comes with
tradeoffs because of its smaller developer ecosystem.

~~~
wila
Understood, it might not fit for every shop. For quite a lot of shops it works
quite well though.

I guess that it wasn't so much that the add-on came at a cost, but more that
it was:

a) a 3rd party developer

b) the only option

As you said it was just one of your issues.

------
ppeetteerr
Adobe is looking more like a holding company trying to grow their membership
offerings than a company building a cohesive product. It's similar to how
Microsoft is acquiring successful companies but having a hard time
incorporating them into their ecosystem (Skype, anyone?).

I don't see this going well for either Adobe or Magento. Remember when Adobe
acquired Macromedia and killed Fireworks? And then Sketch came in and neatly
filled the void? That's kind of what Adobe appears to do to companies.

I'm not saying Adobe is bad, but their diverse portfolio of products won't be
well integrated for years and in that time, there is the possibility of
killing a brand simply because it does not keep up with time (and
competition).

Good luck, Adobe.

~~~
briansage
Adobe's behavior makes me think more of Oracle than Microsoft:

Acquire a product with a competitive moat, reskin a year later but change no
features, attach an enterprise sales force to it to wring the hell out of
every last subscription dollar you can get, and then maybe release a few
substantive changes when sales begin to slide.

~~~
jimnotgym
We took our company off Magento enterprise and onto community. We paid to have
the features we wanted from Enterprise developed on community exactly because
there was no guarantee that the price of Enterprise wouldn't get racked up
every year. Feeling good about that decision today

------
tambourine_man
I’ve made a pretty good money over the years with Magento and even though I’d
still recommend it to clients (since there’s no better alternative) every
interaction with it is painful. To the point where I mentally add an
“insalubrity” tax to every Magento invoice I make.

I don’t know how to feel about this accquisition. I already depend on Adobe a
lot more than I’d like to, and this makes it no better.

~~~
leviathant
Out of curiosity, are you familiar with Workarea? Seems to fit pretty squarely
in the 'better alternative' category,at least for medium-sized and up
companies.

~~~
tambourine_man
Open source and humongous ecosystem makes Magento unbeatable.

You would be nuts to release a payment gateway with no support for it.

~~~
leviathant
>makes Magento unbeatable

I don't know if you've had a look at the other comments in this thread, but if
Magento was actually unbeatable, let's just say I'd still be coding in PHP
today.

~~~
tambourine_man
PHP is pretty hard to beat as well.

I’m sure you are aware that most of the web runs on it. Wikipedia, WordPress
and most other big CMSs. Oh yes, and that Facebook thing.

------
jsntrmn
This acquisition has piqued my interest moreso than your average bear because
I work for a major retailer that just so happens to be heavily invested in
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). We are using AEM strictly as a CMS and are
otherwise heavily invested in Oracle Endeca to drive commerce from a
search/nav perspective. And then there's the whole payment and order
management issue which we handle with custom, in-house solutions.

I'm a little scared to hear all the horrible experiences with Magento because
I'm a developer on our search team and working with Endeca (or any Oracle
product for that matter) is an absolute nightmare. I flat out hate Endeca.
We'll be due for a replatform in another few years (once the business gets
sick of us trying to bolt on big data features to Endeca, which just wasn't
built for such). I can imagine us going the Magento route since we already
have hefty contracts in place with Adobe.

I've tried to pitch a custom solution based on Elasticsearch (or Solr
directly) but my director and VP don't want to hear about anything that
involves building various business user UIs from scratch. Endeca provides a
(sigh... Flash based) UI that gets the job done, and on top of that we have
several legacy apps with (can't believe I'm saying this in 2018) UIs written
in classic ASP.

Other than Shopify or Workarea, are there any platforms you, the ever-full-of-
knowledge gurus of HN would recommend? I really like both of the
aforementioned products because they give you a lot of useful UIs out the box
(in addition to the capabilities of the platforms themselves), but they also
give you a lot of content management and we don't need that.

~~~
blackdogie
It's a smart move for Adobe I believe. I really can't see how the overlap of
customer base for AEM / Magento will be, also it will be interesting to see if
they start to do more b2b or b2c eCommerce. It is an interesting time in the
space, strong CMS adding eCommerce, and strong eCommerce adding CMS. It's
highly likely that Salesforce / Commerce Cloud will expand into the CMS space
and possibly more consolidation of platforms.

There are some abstract systems like Moltin.com that offer eCommerce APIs
Platforms like BigCommerce.com / VTex.com / Miva.com / Volusion.com are also
pretty popular.

Then you have some end to end ones like Coredna.com* that offer B2B, B2C and
CMS.

*Disclaimer : I work for the last company

~~~
jsntrmn
Awesome reply! This is why I love HN. I'll be sure to investigate all of the
options you've provided, including your own company. It takes a lot of
integrity to list your own product last and include a disclaimer to boot.
Kudos!

~~~
AJSturrock
Hey! one of the founders at Moltin here. Thanks for the mention @blackdogie,
always a nice surprise to stumble across! Coredna looks interesting (nice
explainer video!).

@jsntrmn we often see the need to de-risk technology choices for decision
makers at larger retailers which can sometimes be in conflict to what a
developer looks for when selecting a tool or service. We're trying to get the
right balance at moltin as we think both voices need to be at the table.

Happy to chat with either of you if you would like to share
learnings/experience or if I can help in any way, just drop me a message
adam@moltin.com

~~~
blackdogie
Great to connect, will reach out via email. Thanks for the kind words about
the website, it was just relaunched last week.

------
somecallitblues
They’ll drive it into the ground like what they did with Business Catalyst.
The things will get stuck in middle management who doesn’t know web.

------
bhouston
So Adobe wants to take on Shopify. Interesting. I wonder if that can work?
What is Shopify's long term competitive advantage here?

BTW how much was it acquired for?

~~~
sumoboy
1.6 billion.

They bought demandware nearly 2 years ago for just slightly higher which has
ecommerce. They just recently ended Business catalyst which was a POS. I guess
they magento is the key to taking on big and small ecom sites in the future
with this POS.

~~~
desireco42
I can't figure out what you mean by POS, is it Point of Sale, or more common
attribute meant to describe Magento performance? :)

~~~
sumoboy
A piece of sh%#

My bad on demandware.. ^^

------
simonsarris
The eCommerce/fintech/small-biz-tech space generally is really heating up this
year. Small timeline:

* Verifone was acquired in early April.

* Square acquires Weebly in late April (to round out itself in eCommerce, which was its weakness vs Shopify)

* PayPal acquires iZettle in May (to compete with SQ where they failed in the past with its homegrown product)

* Square just yesterday issues $750 in convertible notes (I have a lot of speculation on this one, but something big is brewing)

* Adobe acquired Magento today (SHOP stock way down on the news)

Earlier, when Amazon mulled p2p payments (Square has Cash App, PYPL has
Venmo), both stocks dip on the announcement, which was otherwise pretty hollow
PR. Amazon actually had a Square/iZettle competitor called Amazon Register
that they shut down back in 2015, so I would not be surprised if they want to
get back into transaction spaces. Also wouldn't be surprised if they made a
bid for SHOP or SQ within 2 years in order to get into eCommerce and small biz
tech generally.

Both SQ and SHOP and PYPL have had nice years, stock price wise. Disclosure:
I'm watching this space _very closely_ and am long SQ, AMZN.

~~~
MagnitudeFC
Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on SHOP as an investment? Do you
think Square (now that they've acquired Weebly will be able to slow down their
growth)?

Also, SHOP is sitting on >1.3B of cash and their new CFO hinted at an
acquisition - any guesses on who/what kind of business might be a good
acquisition for them?

------
damon_c
Last time I interacted with Magento, one of their customer service people
verified my plain text login password over the phone.

edit: (it was about 5 years ago)

~~~
tedivm
I honestly don't know how that's possible, as right from the start Magento
used a (very crappy) MD5+SALT scheme for password encryption.

Here's a 2013 version of their password hashing file[1] which should confirm
that they were using the (very crappy) method back then.

OSCommerce, which Magenta was attempting to replace, had password hashing as
far back as 2006.

Maybe you're thinking of a different service?

1\.
[https://github.com/nexcess/magento/blob/master/app/code/core...](https://github.com/nexcess/magento/blob/master/app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Encryption.php)

~~~
snorlaxle
I know it sounds implied but he didn't say customer service had access to
plain text password, just that he verified it over the phone. You can surely
do that with hashed password but it's still not a good practice.

~~~
damon_c
I was not enjoying Magento and my password was something like "MagentoSuck$"

I don't remember who I was talking to exactly but they said something like
"and you're logging in with the username <whatever> and the password (fading
awkwardly) MagentoSucks..."?

And we both kind of laughed nervously...

------
desireco42
So a company whose fantastic products are also known to take forever to load
even on most performant machines, acquires a ecommerce that looks good on the
outside, but it is pain to run in every scenario :). Kind of make sense in
some weird way.

------
sumoboy
Can we be like Shopify but with more baggage? I think there were better
options here.

~~~
bkruse
"We want to buy Shopify but we can pay 1/10th of Shopify's valuation"

I think Magento is "fairly priced" priced at ~10% of Shopify's valuation

~~~
grrowl
The code is already Adobe Quality and with a horrifically overengineered
database layer to boot. They'll get along just fine.

------
ry167
This is likely the reason they are shutting down an existing Website platform
of theirs, Business Catalyst. [1]

While it was a dated system (purchased in 2009) it came as quite a surprise
that it was reaching the end of its life.

I think it will be very interesting where Adobe takes this

[1]:
[https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2470031](https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2470031)

~~~
dawnerd
And magento isn't dated? It'd probably make more sense if they bought someone
like shopify

------
rpncreator
This is not Adobe's first e-commerce dance.

Adobe attempted an acquisition of Hybris Software, a Java-based e-commerce
platform back in 2013 (see first link). This would have meshed well with their
Adobe Experience Manager, their CMS solution (an integration already existed,
and was also based on Java/Spring). SAP offered Hybris the opportunity to
operate independently for two years, and Hybris was acquired by SAP.

What is surprising is how AEM and Magento will integrate, considering that AEM
is a Java/Maven based CMS and Magento is PHP.

(And yes, the article doesn't seem relevant, but contains an important
reference)

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-09/steve-
you...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-02-09/steve-young-is-an-
athlete-who-s-actually-good-at-finance)

~~~
TheSockStealer
They have actually had a partnership/integration for ~2 years. Basically it
comes down to using AEM as the "Glass" in front of Magento. Basically just
using Magento as an API and doing all of the front-end with AEM. I know there
are a couple of big sites that have gone this direction, but I think the M2
API is still not feature rich enough to make it work easily.

------
sparrish
Seems like a strange purchase for Adobe. How does this fit into their market
or ecosystem?

~~~
knicholes
I'm an Adobe employee, but know nothing about the real reasons for the
acquisition. We focus on providing great digital experiences for our customers
and their customers. Something you may not know is that Adobe is a leader in
digital MARKETING. We help people create/monitor/optimize ad campaigns, we
help customize website experiences for users, and we help with website
creation in general-- Brackets, the IDE, Dreamweaver, all of the other
creative products, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Analytics-- it all kind of
ties together to help create an end-to-end experience for users, now
especially in the commerce arena. Adobe is no stranger to web content
creation.

Adobe is also focusing on AI, so if they have good talent over there, I'm sure
it wouldn't hurt to have their predictive analytics tech over on our side.

Also, I'm sure Adobe wouldn't mind the large ecosystem of Magento plugin
developers writing plugins for [https://www.adobe.io](https://www.adobe.io).

I can imagine this would be a great way to identify people who could benefit
from switching from Google Analytics to Adobe Analytics, as well.

~~~
bdefore
Reads like parody.

~~~
abraae
Not parody, MARKETING!

~~~
chiefalchemist
Can't it be both? ;)

------
sleighboy
eBay/PayPal bought and sold Magento before this. When a payment processor that
could embed and make its' offerings the optimal experience within a heavily-
used ecomm platform decides to ditch it, I think you have a dud.

------
krsdcbl
Right now, i am picturing the heap of _something_ traditionally garbled out by
Adobe "webdesign software".

Then I remember all the fun and the "good times" I had in my life building
shops with Magento.

I'm kinda scared of whatever Adobe is up to here...

------
tomcooks
Let me know in 5 years how delicious the corporate ____you 're eating is, I
guess.

Blah.

------
tomelders
Makes a lot of sense. Adobe has some warped ideas about what makes something
good.

------
victor106
Having worked on Hybris and Magento and a few other eCommerce platforms,
Hybris is the best of the bunch. When I say best only relatively...it has its
own headaches but at least its not as horrific as Magento

------
dandare
Tangential: I am not familiar with Magento and is not easy to identify what
they do from their website.

The "Why Magento" section is especially useless.

~~~
Raphmedia
Magento is the company. The product is main Magento Commerce:
[https://magento.com/products/magento-
commerce](https://magento.com/products/magento-commerce)

------
paulie_a
So basically run away from Magento now that Adobe is involved.

------
RyanShook
This seems like a very weird match.

------
SirFatty
I cannot see how this is a good thing...

~~~
coldtea
Well, it's real software, open source, used by millions, and it's making its
developers some money.

That's good enough in my book.

And way better than some BS startup that gets billions for "uber for cats" and
"self-erasing dick-pics for teens".

~~~
SirFatty
I'm referring to Adobe purchasing it.

