MacrAdobeMedia

Adobe just bought Macromedia for 3.4 billion dollars.

I had to check the dates of the press releases to make sure this wasn't a huge April Fool being played on the web, print and multimedia industries. It's bona fide.

Imagine Google buying Yahoo!, or Microsoft buying Apple - oh wait, they already kinda did... - how about Microsoft buying Intel? Huge.

If your company works with: web, print materials, sign-making, CD-ROM resources or anything to do with fancy static or moving images - you'll probably have at least a few products from one or both of Adobe and Macromedia. And now they are one.

I'm guessing that pretty much their whole suite of Applications will be able to publish to PDF and Flash fairly soon; not such a bad thing! Having Photoshop and Illustrator being able to author detailed Flash movies and then plug all of that into a Copy-Protected PDF in just one easy step... there are a lot of possibilities for improved productivity.

But this deal effectively kills the last ounce of competition in the industry; these two powerhouses had equivilent products that had to fight for market share.... Like Fireworks and ImageReady; Freehand and Illustrator. Look for "FireReady MX CS 2006" and "Freehand Illustrator MX CS 2006" next year.

Will this kill innovation and drive up prices (higher than their already inflated level)? Well every new version costs more than the last, anyway - so maybe nothing will change.

I'll continue to use Jasc Paint Shop Pro thank you very much. But it's not like there's an alternative to Flash or Director or Acrobat.