Adobe to acquire Macromedia

Today it was announced that Adobe will acquire Macromedia in a 3.4 billion dollar deal. It'll be interesting to see the long-term results of this; Flash probably was an important part of the purchase, especially considering the threat of FlashPaper competing with PDF for web publishing. With Flash in their portfolio Adobe might be less committed to SVG, which would be kind of sad.

These kinds of deals are almost never good for current customers – of either company, although I would expect Fireworks and Freehand users be particularly worried. I shudder at the thought of what might happen to the GUIs when Adobe and Macromedia teams starts working together. Their applications have at least been mostly consistent in their user-unfriendliness until now.

18 April, 2005