Sometimes is better have 30 companies without a pattern rule, tham 2 companies with just one definition equal for each other.

I worked for a major corporation for over thirty years (much larger than these two) and we were acquired by our biggest competitor. Aside from foisting early retirement on all the over-fifties, the merger forced the adaptation of the acquirers operating mode throught the system. And of course many businesses and products were dropped.
Today, five years later, the result is a stagnant company with lousy stock performance. It is all in the implementation, not in the strategy.

Another thought: forget about Microsoft. Think about Apple. If Apple keeps stepping on Adobe's toes think what would happen if Adobe offered a cross-platform upgrade to their suite of products - which will certainly include Flash and Dreamweaver. How many Mac users would migrate - especially web developers!

Probably what on offer from these companies will just get worse and more expensive, once there is virtually no competition in the market place for these products.

I really can't discount the basic view of the article, we may end up with a one application monster or suite of monsters (such as Microsoft could only do.) However Photoshop is in direct conflict with that idea.

I quickly migrated from Aldus PageMaker to Quark in 1990 when desktop started to become a real printing tool. I spent the painful years hanging on to Quark as the company dropped the ball for OSX and migrated to InDesign in 2003. So far I haven't even thought of looking back.

The same thing has happened with DreamWeaver. The program always was glitchy and even with Studio MX it never came up to speed on OSX. (I run a 2Gig dual G4 with 2Gig Ram.) My coding kept going more and more to BBEdit, only because the DreamWeaver interface just couldn't cut it anymore. GoLive has been a wonderful and seemingly solid replacement for DreamWeaver, especially with the CS suite interactivity. I never could find any UserGroup or review that really addressed the poor startup, long file saves and general poor performance of DreamWeaver. I never could pull the trigger on the Studio MX 2004 upgrade.

Flash is a different story, but it's performance flaws and cumbersome tools are overlooked because there isn't anything else out there even closely like it.

With all of that, if anyone could purchase Macromedia and do something positive with it Adobe would be the one. I'm hoping the merger will truly enhance the tools we use every day.

I am a long time Windows (and lately Mac as well) user of the three major drawing programs (Illustrator, Freehand and CorelDraw). I learned Draw first (version 1), Freehand second, Illustrator third. For a long time I also ranked their usabality in this order. Illustrator was unusable until version 6. Freehand was great until it was taken over by Macromedia. I stopped using it after version 8 because it was clear that Macromedia was arrogantly not interested in supporting print users. (I won't even reinstall it to support old clients.) That left Draw and Illustrator. While Illustrator has more or less caught up to Draw in terms of features, its usability still leaves a lot to be desired compared to Draw. (Would it be so difficult to incorporate a print preview with separations, or are designers supposed to be macho enough not to need such sissy stuff? And why does Illustrator insist on dozens of useless pop-up warnings when you make obvious mistakes yet fail to warn you that you are about to unrecoverably rasterize 200 hours worth of work when you apply a drop shadow and save the file as an eps?) I still use both programs, sometimes in the same job (each has its strengths and files are reasonably interchangeable).

One would like to think that CorelDraw still remains a contender, or that Adobe would support (and improve) both Freehand and Illustrator, (hah!) but Corel having shot itself in the foot financially and abandoned its Mac versions, I am afraid there is nothing to keep Adobe from steamrollering the graphics market, something anyone who relies on vector drawing programs should dread.

Microsoft has not addressed the needs of the creative pro, but who cares? Adobe/Macromedia are doing great things and hope they keep it up. I own stock in both companies and I don't expect every company to be good at everything. I just hope Adobe will continue to get better and better. I also hope Microsoft will continue to get better. I use many products from both companies and like them.

As a studio of 12 creative professionals we all think that this news sucks. We live and breathe Macromedia. They have better support and products. One co-worker said he would get a sex change first before ever using Illustrator or InDesign. We will all be having nightmares for awhile.

Macromedia has the finest support in the industry. Adobe has better than Quark, but not by much. Will we loose the support, or will Adobe learn from the pros?

As a Graphic Designer / Web Designer - here's my biased, narrow, product centric observations;

I live in Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

Photoshop – simply the best set of tools for graphic design.

Fireworks – once the design is complete, nothing compares with this program for slicing and dicing your images for the web. It's tools in this area are much better thought and much more efficient than ImageReady. It's support for both vector and bitmap makes it possible to easily do both in one program. It's support for pop-up menus (etc), Dreamweaver integration and the concept of Frames are all fantastic. However, it's graphic tools, though excellent in many ways, are crude compared to Photoshop. Since a great looking design is a higher priority for me, I'd rather deal with overcoming the inferior web mechanics of Photoshop/ImageReady. Sometimes I'll take a flattened final image from Photoshop and move to Fireworks for web preparation. Often I'll create simple slices in Photoshop and handle the heavy lifting in Dreamweaver. I would love to see Fireworks web features integrated into Photoshop – this would be a real killer app.

Dreamweaver – the industry standard like Photoshop is for image editing. If you don't use it, you can't take advantage all the great plug-ins that have popped up for it. It also supports application development, though I don't use it for that. It also works great with Contribute, which is a fabulous end-user tool for editing content. It's also stable, which I can't say for GoLive.

ImageReady – I really dislike this program. I hate the fact that it is separate from Photoshop, and that the graphic tools often work differently than Photoshop. It is simply much harder to work with than Fireworks to do the web stuff. Things like rollovers which are a snap in Fireworks are more cumbersome to deal with. It's also corrupted my files more than once, so I don't really trust it.

GoLive – I barely use this program. I tried learning it when the Creative Suite came out, but it crashed every few minutes, and I simply don't have time for this sort of thing. It does have some very nice, designer oriented features though.

Flash – I find the tools extremely unintuitive and difficult to use. It never seems to do what I think it should, and I often can't figure out why. I'm sure part of the problem is me, but I'm not a total idiot, having worked with software since 1979 and spent 5 years programming business applications for large companies. For the small amount of Flash work that I do, I prefer to use Swish, which is a much more intuitive application that makes outstanding results quite easy (though it certainly does not have Flash's depth of features). I would love to see Adobe do something to make this program easier to use.

Illustrator – A great program, though I don't use it that often. I miss the bitmap tools of Photoshop, and often just go back to Photoshop and use the vector tools there. I do use it to create elements that can then be imported to Photoshop.
InDesign – a great app. Since I focus on the web, I use it infrequently when I do print work, or need to layout pdf files that will be published for use on the web.

Freehand – never use it.

I agree with the concern that a lack of competition could be a problem down the road (like the stagnant IE 6 browser has been after Microsoft won the browser wars).

Some concerns:

As a package designer, I rely heavily on certain features of FreeHand to create multiple alternatives of a design for presentation to a client, namely the more-than-one page feature. While I love the editing capabilities of Illustrator, it doesn't come close to FreeHand in speed. I have close to 3000 fonts on my 350 MHz G4 and FreeHand 10 starts in 3 sec, Illustrator 10 in almost 2 minutes. Now that Adobe and Macromedia are one, where will I find a multi-page draw program that's fast?

Secondly, the argument that this will give Adobe the ability to compete with Microsoft is bull. I don't use a single Microsoft product on a daily basis, except maybe Excel. A word to the FTC - don't forget the print design industry. The web isn't everything.

Paste-up anyone?

Adobe / Macromedia have consistently looked after the Creative sector - Quark has not, preferring to re-position itself as a corporate workflow marketeer (downgrading the creative process to an administrative role), while relying on fat income from reluctantly improved software when threatened - simple as that - I see only good things ahead as Adobe / Macromedia get together and continue to provide relevant software.

As Adobe has earlier killed the best type manager that existed for the PC, I am not holding out that they will fix or revive Fontographer. And my experience with the suite is incompatility between Illustrator amd say In Design for color pallates. Save Freehand. Do we really have any choices now at all?

I disagree with your comments. While some Macromedia and Adobe products do overlap, they have different market segments. Macromedia is definitely more catered to Web site and interactive, while Adobe leans more toward print.

From what I have read, this is about competing with Microsoft, who plans to unveil an "Acrobat-like" product later this year. If Adobe is positioning itself to compete against Microsoft, I doubt they will languish.