The big tech story this week is that Adobe is buying Macromedia. I have used software from both companies a great deal, so I'm curious how the product integration will pan out. The consensus on Slashdot and other sites is that the main motivation behind this is so that Adobe can get control of Flash. For the other Adobe and Macromedia products, the combined roadmap is less clear. There are siginificant product overlaps between the two companies, such as between Illustrator & Freehand and GoLive & Dreamweaver. It would not make sense to keep all products from both companies in development, and anti-trust regulators may be force Adobe to sell off some product lines in order for the merger to go through (Adobe was has already been forced to sell Freehand once before, when they bought Aldus).
I think that purchasing Macromedia is going to cause a severe financial hit for Adobe. For users that think their products are not likely to survive the transition, this announcement will cause them to hold-off on making further investments in until they see if their favored products survive. And for users of the relatively "safe" products, like Photoshop and Acrobat, they may hold off on purchasing upgrades until Adobe comes out with an integrated product line -- I know that I would rather have a Creative Suite that combined Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver. Either Adobe has mis-judged the community reaction to this, or else they are purchasing Macromedia primarily so that another company such as Microsoft doesn't get their hands on Flash.
The products that I use most from both companies (Adobe Framemaker and Macromedia RoboHelp) have hardly been mentioned in the press coverage, and I'm sure they didn't figure into Adobe's decision making process. I'm worried that this merger will cause Adobe to pay even less attention to Frame than they already do, and even worse, they might try something stupid like integrating Frame and RoboHelp. This merger creates an interesting situation for Quadralay, whose WebWorks product competes directly with RoboHelp, but relies on Framemaker for content authoring.
PS: Here is some interesting reading on the history of Flash.
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