Earthquake in the world of online publishing

As most people already know, today Adobe bought Macromedia. What does that mean? Well, there are a number of things, but I think that most are good:

- Less competition in the field, less innovation
- More integration between important technologies, such as Freehand, Photoshop and Flash
- Cheaper packages for small companies that needed Photoshop for image editing and Dreamweaver for making webpages for example
- Better interfaces (there was a big lawsuit fight going on about Flash using some UI features that were patented by Adobe)

But when are we going to see any changes? Well, packaging is not too hard to change, so I would expect this to happen reasonably soon (in a year). Integration is always a headache. I wouldn't expect to see anything in this direction for the next 2 years. But I'm hopeful! I think that graphic publishing in general needs some sort of reality check.