Last week, the Department of Justice approved Adobe's buyout. Experts analyze where combining the two companies' technologies might lead.Last April, Adobe Systems Inc. announced its intention to acquire Macromedia Inc.
In August an overwhelming majority of Adobe and Macromedia shareholders approved the $3.4 billion, all-stock deal. Last Friday, the two companies announced that the Department of Justice has given the merger a green light.
As of this writing, the two companies offered few details about how they'll integrate product lines, probably because the transaction can't go through until it gets the go-ahead from a few straggler European courts.
Click here to read more about the Department of Justice's treatment of the Adobe-Macromedia Merger.
In a joint press release the companies said they were confident the transaction will go through some time this fall.
Three of the biggest questions include: "How will Dreamweaver and GoLive co-exist, or will they?" "What about FreeHand versus Illustrator?" and, of course, "In what new directions will Macromedia technologies push PDF and Acrobat?"
Adobe's dropped few clues as to how it will deal with those matters, but in company documents it claims to intend to beef up Web and mobile content creation tools as well as to offer "more comprehensive solutions to government and enterprise verticals."
At times in the past, Adobe has used similar words to mean "expand its support of Acrobat documents and PDF forms server software."
The third question proved to be an interesting one at the PDF Conference late last month, as host Carl Young convened a think tank including PDF developers Tim Sullivan of ActivePDF and Chris Pieper of FormRouter Inc. to discuss the merger. Adobe wasn't part of the session, as federal regulations barred company representatives' public comment on the deal at that time.
Young, Pieper and Sullivan proposed an interesting future for PDF and Acrobat:
Individuals getting more love from Adobe. The "enterprise mentality" of Adobe pushing large Acrobat installations into corporate and governmental environments will be now augmented by Macromedia's tele-sales expertise, Pieper said.
That means Adobe will be better equipped to deal with individual users. With people inside more in tune with end users, Pieper suggested, it will make for a happier, more thriving Acrobat user base.
Better Web deployment of PDFs. Will GoLive go away? It doesn't matter, as Dreamweaver is the platform upon which many more sites reside.
Adobe engineers will get to go "under the hood" and better natively integrate PDF and HTML together in Dreamweaver and make them more complementary technologies instead of the rivals they seem to be now, especially in the world of forms.
Flash and PDF working together in forms. Flash supports rudimentary—at least in comparison to PDF—forms today. But Pieper sees possibilities in integrating the two technologies in forms. Flash videos could explain how to fill out complicated PDF forms, or even spur real-time interaction between the form user and host servers.
Sullivan added that he believes some of the best parts of PDF—such as its rendering engine and digital signatures technology—could be built into Flash and make it more useful, too. PDF could get a nice boost if Adobe builds into PDF Flash's "dynamic updating" of a document from external data sources.
"Rich-media forms are a great opportunity—I think when we're done, we're going to see PDF, HTML and Flash as the dominant forms technologies," Pieper said, adding that his company, as a forms ASP (application service provider) that attempts to be brand-agnostic and support all technologies, doesn't get asked much about Microsoft Corp.'s entry into the forms space. "Frankly, we don't see a lot of InfoPath at this point."
ColdFusion meeting the PDF developer community. If Adobe gets excited about the care and feeding of Macromedia's ColdFusion Web application development programming language, Sullivan sees real possibilities for Adobe and third-party developers supporting the integration of PDF-related Web apps through custom "tags," developer parlance for macros or Java code sets that work with ColdFusion.
Whatever happens, Pieper said, it will take some time. In his own company's experience working with Adobe and other large corporations, he said, if there's one thing you can count on, it's that it will take some time for the new entity to figure out its next move.
"I don't think we're going to see anything come out of Adobe that's going to have any material effect on what [FormRouter does] or what anybody does for maybe eight months or 12 months," he said.
"If you've ever been a part of a merger or acquisition—and I have—they're not like weddings where people get together and are happy. They almost start off like divorces. Maybe [later] it turns into a wedding."
