I am so disgusted at the news. Does Adobe have any serious competition now?

I agree. I love adobe products, but announcments like this can't be good for the consumer. Bye bye Quark with it's feeble page layout/web page software. Adobe just became a 800 lb. gorilla x2.

Don't be so sure about the 800 pound gorilla. Adobe just paid a whopping price for Macromedia. Macromedia shares cannot possibly be worth 69% of the value of Adobe's shares. Macromedia was only able to sell itself at such a premium because Adobe had no other choice for serious growth, and Macromedia knew it. Adobe will be digging itself out of this whole for a long time. I suspect Adobe will find itself the target of a purchase buy Microsoft or Apple in the not-to-distant future--which may be another reason Adobe did this: to prevent Apple or Microsoft from buying Adobe and competing directly with them on their front door.

It seems to be Adobe's biggest competition now is Apple itself. Apple already blew them out of the water in movie editing, Pages may take on the lower end of DTP, iPhoto 5's editing has gotten pretty powerful and Tiger will possibly make it more so. Motion may kill After Effects, too.

There are others. Stone Design has a very good page layout app (Create), there's Freeway for web design from Softpress, and more. Both of these apps come from smaller companies that don't have the marketing juggernaut Adobe has though.

My biggest problem with Adobe has been their fiddly support of the Mac market as of late (see what Steve Jobs said about them in his recent Fortune interview about why Apple developed iMovie/FCP).

Still, I'm sad to see the two major Aldus apps finally gone (PageMaker and Freehand, with Presentation long gone). They helped change the world.

Perhaps I don't fully understand antitrust regulations, but I don't see how this merger could be approved by the gov't... Dreamweaver and GoLive are THE major web design apps (at least on the Mac... I guess PC users have Frontpage too). I was under the impression that this kind of situation (one big company buying it's only real competition) is exactly what the law is supposed to prevent.

--Mike

Why assume that DreamWeaver, Freehand etc are going to disappear completely? I would expect that Adobe intends to combine Illustrator's and Freehand's features into one, and ditto for GoLive-DreamWeaver.

The downside of this is the (significant) risk that the products will stagnate sooner or later. However, Adobe wants to keep people buying upgrades. To this, they need to add new features, improve interfaces etc. While I have no doubt this process will be slower without the competition that Macromedia provides, I expect we'll see many of these apps merge into an upgraded best-of-both-worlds upgrade first. Then it'll stagnate at bit, I'm sure.

I'm not saying this is good (competition is required for continued innovation), but I just don't think we're likely to see Freehand and DreamWeaver killed outright. Both apps were arguably better than their Adobe-branded counterparts, and I don't think Adobe is boneheaded enough to spend $3.4B and just throw away some of the top-shelf intellectual property they're getting in the deal.

I can't see Adobe killing Dreamweaver. I would daresay that Dreamweaver is more widely used than GoLive. I'm basing this off of want ads for web designers; I've never seen anyone looking for a designer fluent in GoLive. Yeah, it's not the best criterion, but it's all I have right now other than personal observances, which support the Dreamweaver usage. The two more likely scenarios are rolling them together or killing GoLive.