Anonymous

London

Account Manager

You have to see this as a natural response to two organisations already in the sites of Microsoft or Apple. Adobe and Macromedia have a portfolio of products with little cross over. To merge makes them a formidable prospect in terms of acquisition at a future date by one of the big OS houses (eg Microsoft/Apple). From a shareholders point of view, this is not only leading to a nice short term windfall, but setting them up for gains over the long period.

From a users point of view, we may see a consolidation of user interface, which can only benefit everyone in the long term, bringing some savings in cross training across products, as well as improving workflow through better integration.

There will still be competition from open source, so choice is available if you really want it, but there are caveats to this. Namely, market dominance driving up prices, with the only alternatives being non industry standard packages (eg how many agencies do you know who employ GIMP over Photoshop as their tool of choice?).

Mergers are inevitable. Let's just make sure it's the right companies merging.