The Acquisition of the Week

Adobe acquires Macromedia. Wow. Well, what does one say to that? There are plenty of seemingly complementary products across the two organizations, though the target market of products like Photoshop and Fireworks are completely different and could, therefore, be potentially considered non-competitors. What most users are worried about is what will happen to Flash and Dreamweaver and support of professional development in enterprises who have adopted it as a rich user interface development platform.

They have a valid concern. While Adobe has some kick ass enterprise class software, they have never before been responsible for a truly developer oriented product. The support necessary to successfully move a development environment forward is no small undertaking, and given the amount of support readily available from Adobe for developers utilizing the APIs of their enterprise class products, this could be an issue for existing Macromedia customers. There are some exciting possibilities for new products - especially in the forms arena - that arise from a marriage between the two companies. Given Adobe's forms management and processing software and its Web Services focused integration with Acrobat Reader, the possibilities are endless. While Flash based user interfaces are still not as ubiquitous as other Web based technologies, an easy integration with Adobe's back end servers might prove to be just the kick in the rear Flash needs to propel it into a serious application user interface platform rather than being primarily used for ads, games and photo slideshows.Let's just hope Yetisports isn't adversely impacted by this acquisition.