Holy shit!

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

via: About Adobe - Adobe to acquire Macromedia

My thoughts and hopes for what’s going to happen because of this:

1. GoLive will GoAway. (will anyone care?)

2. Hopefully they’ll take Illustrator’s tools and interface and slap Flash’s timeline and actionscript onto it. At the very least, we’ll get beefed-up interoperability between Illustrator and Flash and PDF (which would be extremely helpful).

3. Since Adobe was pushing SVG as an alternative to Flash, I wonder if they’ll keep promoting it? Not that they were doing a particularly good job.

4. Fireworks will go away. (will anyone care?) This application has always suffered because of Photoshop’s dominance.

5. Wonder if they’ll build any bridges between After Effects and Director? Imagine including an After Effects project as a ‘live object’ within Director, that could be cool.

6. Nothing will happen to InDesign.

7. Hopefully they’ll build better font support into Flash. Flash’s font handling sucks hard.

8. Import Flash animations into After Effects? Holy shit! That would be great. permanent link to this post