Over the past weeks, I have heard many questions about the impending merger of Adobe and Macromedia, and the most frequent one is, "What does this mean for the publishing market?"

The quick answer to this is "probably not very much." The merger makes obvious sense from a corporate consolidation standpoint, no doubt about that, but as for changes from the direct impact on the everyday reality of content producers, I'm not exactly holding my breath.

The reason for this is simple: Macromedia and Adobe lived in almost mutually exclusive worlds. Macromedia dominates the Web market much as Adobe dominates graphic design and image retouching.

Both companies have powerful, successful brands and products, and neither one can really invade the other's space in terms of market presence.

The Adobe-Macromedia merger could reduce competition, analysts say. Click here to read more.

FreeHand has been losing market share to Illustrator for years, and is clearly not on a very aggressive development path. Likewise, Adobe GoLive, despite a strong feature set and strong integration in the Creative Suite, is in no position to pose a threat to Macromedia's tools as far as Web development goes.

So let's look at the document standards that these two companies represent rather than comparing their software applications. Both Adobe's PDF format and Macromedia's Flash are strong in their respective fields. And they both excel at what the other does badly. There is practically no overlap between the two file formats in terms of use. PDF and Flash are produced by different people for divergent communication needs.

Yes, of course, one could imagine a future in which one could embed Flash data in an InDesign document and then export the whole thing to PDF. Or make it easier to display PDFs inside a Flash application. I'm sure both of these possibilities are going to be available in a future version of Adobe's tools, and they are going to make some users really happy.

What I'm less clear about is whose life is going to be dramatically changed by these possibilities. As a reminder, several years ago, Quark announced it would support Flash export from Quark documents. The feature never materialized, but, frankly, I don't think it cost Quark any sales, if you see what I mean.

The Acrobat show buzzes with speculation about the merger. Click here to read more.

The modern publishing landscape has become extremely convoluted, and what used to be relatively small areas of interest have matured into entire industries.

The impact of Flash has been enormous, and despite some technical shortcomings compared to PDF or SVG (particularly in terms of font handling) it is impossible to imagine a Web without that technology. Flash by now has acquired a life of its own, and the most important thing Adobe can do with it is to respect and nurture it.

Integration between Adobe's and Macromedia's tools may yield some interesting benefits, provided we understand where each one of these market segments is going. In small, emerging markets, technology can drive change and quickly define new possibilities. In more mature, more structured or layered markets, technology first of all has to serve the user, and changes can take a long time to happen. Just ask Microsoft…

I hope the merged companies will serve their respective markets as well and as dynamically as in the past. Adobe is significantly increasing its footprint in media production with this merger. Let's hope the combined companies will rise to the challenges of the new entity. This might be more difficult than just integrating technologies and file formats.

Andreas Pfeiffer is founder of The Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies.