Soon after its $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia, the document creation and management company, Adobe Systems, has unveiled three software packages which it claims combines best of both the companies.
During its release, Dave Burkett, Adobe senior director of product management said: “This is our first chance to bring [Adobe and Macromedia] products together into a unified package.”
These three packages are for Adobe's niche users who include Web developers, graphic designers, and videographers. The products are Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash 8.
The companies that slugged it out in the software markets as rivals are trying to leverage each other's skills in a bid to counter competition from Microsoft. This is important for
Adobe as Microsoft is trying to make its mark in document and multimedia software.
Flash, which is the flagship product of Macromedia, can help Adobe develop multimedia applications on the Web space.
The San Jose-based Adobe's chief executive, Bruce Chizen said it "is all about growth."
Shantanu Narayen, chief operating officer and president of Adobe said coming out with these types of "best-of-breed" bundles is going to be Adobe's strategy.
Burkett added: “This is just the first of what's to come. Our future offerings will be even more powerful combined PDF [portable document format] and Flash applications. We have a lot of excited engineers who are dying to work with each other.” He, however, added that it would take at least one more year for the two companies to integrate completely.
Meanwhile, Windows next version known as Vista will be incorporating document management features similar to that of Adobe. Besides, Microsoft is also introducing quite few programs for multimedia production which could pose a threat to Adobe.
Mr. Chizen said: “They have a $40 billion monopoly with unlimited resources. I'll never not worry about them.”
