Adobe will stop selling Contribute and Director on February 1, drop Shockwave for Mac support on March 14

Adobe today announced Adobe Contribute and Adobe Director will no longer be for sale nor supported as of February 1, 2017. At the same time, Adobe is also stopping Shockwave for Mac updates and support on March 14, 2017 after the last release of the product.

The reason Adobe gives for the death of Contribute and Director is simple: The company’s customers are embracing “the new features and efficiencies offered by Creative Cloud.” As for Shockwave, its content is made with Director, so the company is merely tying up loose ends. It’s about time.

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“We appreciate the trust and support of Adobe Director, Contribute and Shockwave customers through the years, and look forward to providing our customers with the best user experience, technology and support through Adobe Creative Cloud,” the Creative Cloud Team said. In other words, “if you haven’t moved to our cloud products yet, we hope this will be the final push you need.”

Originally known as Macromedia Contribute and Macromedia Director, the former is a specialized HTML editor while the latter is a multimedia application authoring platform. Adobe acquired Macromedia in December 2005 and soon rebranded the two by replacing the Macromedia prefix with Adobe. The last stable releases of Contribute and Director were October 2012 and February 2013, respectively.

Shockwave was also made by Macromedia, but was quickly overtaken in popularity by Adobe Flash and Adobe AIR. Given Adobe’s own push to move away from Flash to “new web standards,” it’s honestly surprising that Shockwave has been kept alive for this long. In fact, Adobe isn’t being completely thorough with today’s news: Contribute and Director are going away for both Windows and Mac, but the company is staying quiet regarding Shockwave for Windows.

The reason these products are finally going away is no different than the story of Flash. It’s a mobile world now, which means HTML5 is king. The days of proprietary plugins are numbered as developers focus on building websites and web apps that work across a variety of devices.