I was in shock this morning when I read the news, Adobe will acquire Macromedia in a $3.4 billion dollar deal. Once it finally settled in that this is for real (as long as the share holders agree to it), my mind began racing with a million and one questions, worries, and excitement of what is to come in the coming years.


Currently the majority of my day is spent using a combo of all of these products. And although most work together pretty well; as with anything, working with a bunch of products from different companies is far from seamless. So in my mind having most of the tools I use belong to the same "family" means they should all play together better, and be stronger, in the end. Or so one would hope.

The thing is Adobe is know for being a "design" application company, focusing on Print, Photography, Motion Graphics/Video and some Web. But Macromedia has been dominating the Web industry every since the early dot-com days. My guess is Adobe is feeling a little threatened by Apple in the Motion Graphic/ Video arena. They have nothing to worry about with Print or Photography but it is not going to continue to grow the company like it once did. Interactive is again doing well, and has holds lots of big opportunities in the future. So Adobe is wanting to structure themselves as THE company to look to for anything dealing with the screen (Web, Desktop, Mobile) and print. But as with any restructure, or corporate by out, some features (technologies) will be cut, but those that remain should be much stronger.

Obviously Photoshop nor Flash will be going anywhere, but hopefully will become better integrated. Illustrator will pick up a few of Freehand's tools and then take it over. Fireworks will be re-branded as ImageReady, but will have the same integration with Photoshop as ImageReady already does. After Effects as we know it will die, but a lot of it's features (filters/effects) will end up in Flash, this will be several releases down the line. Since GoLive never really existed, Dreamweaver has nothing to worry about except better integration with all other programs. Contribute will still work hand in hand with Dreamweaver and will also become stronger. ColdFusion is here to stay, it has a very strong following and I presume makes Macromedia a pretty penny. Plus the way it ties into Flash and Dreamweaver makes it one of the best technologies to use with building "Rich Internet Application". Director will be completely phased out, as will Central (only because it never took off like it should). JRun is up in the air, since you can run both FLEX and Coldfusion on other server platforms. It may not be 100% necessary to spend the time and money on to keep alive. FLEX, because of it's young age is anyone's guess. I am not saying it is not a GREAT technology, but the group it is focused toward is completely opposite from that of Adobe's existing audience, and honestly doesn't focus on Macromedia's current audience that much either (since it is being strongly pushed to Java Developers).

So all I know is that it sounds like some very interesting, exciting, and hopefully fun times lay ahead of us! As with everything on this blog these are only my thoughts and I have no inside information as to what Adobe has in mind for what we currently know as Macromedia.