Hey there,
I am a developer who was using Business Catalyst. Adobe purchased this some time ago now. It is an all in one hosted solution which included a quite decent eCommerce component.
The story of Adobe and BC is a long one so I will not cover it all but:
- Adobe has tried low end with Adobe Muse and trying to have it connect to BC to be able to have designers build hosted solutions. While in many ways this was well received, Muse is being end of lifed along with Business Catalyst.
Aimed at designers, a lot of the need to progress sites from the basic drag and draw concept of Muse and other things like site domain, going live etc - It did not work. Adobe were told it would not work but they did not take the advice and ignored it.
- Business Catalyst after purchase had a year of nothing much being done, it was put to the new team taking time to get across it and the transition process. BC was .Net based but you did not have access to the server code.
- For some time BC had a lot of "Infrastructure work" done constantly and not much development on the actual platform. While a lot of talk was made and the partner and developer community for that had a lot of promise the development of the actual platform was slow compared to the rest of the web.
- For some it was clear for a while Adobe did not really understand the web and what developers wanted leads to what their clients wanted.
- Development happened but many things were shown and scrapped and while some things released it was far too slow and developer frustrations kept growing. The Adobe BC team also kept running a policy of updates being the minimum to get it out the door. This lead to releases never being quite what you needed and increasingly prone to errors.
- Bugs and errors increasingly also became a thing where it seemed either the team not wanting to fix them or could not and these continued to mount. Bugs that prevented you using features still exist 7 years down the line and so on.
- Both the team tasked with Business Catalyst got smaller and the developer community, especially some of its previously key and high profile partners moved on after continued frustrations with the lack of understanding of the web from Adobe and the lack of progress on the platform.
There is more to the story and bad tails but basically Adobe had a platform, they are killing it and also have had various Apps about web that have come and gone too. The platform was much more suited for the Adobe Cloud and environment Adobe has. Many people feel a new team with 10 million or less after a year could have got the platform solution back on track.
The platform was also more then eCommerce so you could build out various types of websites.
Magento is Open Source which Adobe do not do, it is also PHP and just eCommerce (I know you can do more but just talking about the core scope)
Adobe Ended the life of Business Catalyst in not a nice way as well and for many have shown a lack of care for the community that was and had been the main driver for its lifespan and activity. (Similar to the Magento community)
The news of this purchase for the developers and agencies using the Adobe BC platform has been shock, laughter and sadness for the Mangento community as well as past staff.
It does not really make sense and I would say to be very concerned.
Adobe has not said what they will be doing but going on their past experience, the fact they had a solution they could have done better with and was more of a fit with their echo system (.Net, C, Azure (they moving from amazon)) etc it does not look good.
I would even say that a lot of the process will be the same. The hype, the talk and so on.. But if you start to see talk from Adobe or Mangento about:
- A transition period and team changes, team members leaving or moving to work in the Adobe environment and for time to be given for this.. This may be like a year and development will slow on the platform. This is to be expected but it will be the first sign.
- The nature of Magento will have to change. Adobe did want to open source a number of projects including Business Catalyst and will likely look to close this for Magento. I understand it is a big part of the community but Adobe will be looking at the hosted cloud element rather then the self hosting. They have had issues supporting web based developers and the low end trying to make wesbites and support costs are high.
They wont want to cover self hosted stuff and while you should be able to keep your hostings you wont get new versions or big updates to those versions. Bugs and security updates (at least for a while) but you should not expect more.
- If you see a lot of talk after that about Infrastructure work (And likely considering its PHP based) then this is the next sign of concern.
I will be very happy if Adobe do not go the path that many of us have already seen them do and it all be different with Magento but at this time I believe the path will be similar if not a bit worse for you unfortunately.
