The dust is slowly settling over the announcement that Adobe is buying Macromedia (Mike Chamber's blog entry on that here) and some facts are emerging. First off the name of the new company will be Adobe Systems Inc, so effectively Macromedia is no more. While it's still early days we can pretty much guarantee is there are going to be a few casualties in the product line-ups of both companies. Adobe is probably going to lose GoLive while on Macromedia's side it is doubtful that Freehand and Fireworks will survive. This might take a while to happen but one thing's for sure, Adobe is going to closely integrate Acrobat with Flash. If you know of my love for the way Adobe has handled the Acrobat Reader then you can understand how happy I am about this. This segment in their press release is quite telling: Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools - and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems. Not that it's relevant but the difference in importance shown on their respective websites is quite interesting. Analysts see this event as a good thing while the community (the majority of which rely on both companies' tools) seems less happy. The Adobe and Macromedia communities are usually quite polarised. I'm very sad to see the Macromedia name go as I was quite a bit of a fanboy. In fact, I'm wearing my "experience matters" t-shirt as I type this. Snif. UPDATE: Kottke does a much better round-up here. Hey, he does this for a living.