With Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, many products on both sides will change, stagnate or be dropped altogether.For a few years now, the main competitors of most products in Adobe Systems Inc.'s Adobe Creative Suite have been similar products from Macromedia Inc. But with Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, many of the products on both sides will change, stagnate or be dropped altogether.
The acquisition itself won't be finalized until close to the end of this year, so the effects will take some time to emerge. In fact, we'll likely see new releases of many products from Adobe and Macromedia before the acquisition is completed.
The companies that rely on these products, however, should start preparing for the future. Although it's impossible to predict exactly how everything will play out, here are eWEEK Labs' best guesses on how the acquisition will affect Adobe Creative Suite and its associated products.
Click here for eWEEK Labs' review of Adobe Creative Suite 2.
Adobe Acrobat doesn't face any direct competitor within the Macromedia stable and actually stands to gain quite a bit of functionality through integration with Macromedia products such as FlashPaper and Macromedia's set of e-learning and training applications. Pretty much the same can be said of Adobe InDesign.
Macromedia also doesn't have a direct competitor to Adobe Photoshop, although Fireworks comes close. We expect Fireworks to become integrated in some way with Photoshop, either as an add-on or as a stand-alone product that is often bundled with Photoshop.
Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Macromedia Tools' Outlook Mixed
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