Another Brick in the Wall: Macromedia Agrees to Become Part of Adobe

dobe Systems made an eye-widening play Monday, offering $3.4 billion in stock for rival Macromedia, which, if approved by stockholders, will move Adobe more fully into the developer marketplace and give it critical access to—and control over—one of the most widely accessible desktop runtimes, the Flash Player.

While the full details of Adobe's plans—including the non-trivial issue of how it will handle competing, duplicative product lines (see Table 1) in the long term—will be revealed over time, it's clear that the ubiquity of the Flash Player is an asset that Adobe can leverage in its efforts to transform the PDF file format. The company has already undertaken to reinvent the PDF format, offering interactivity and the option for developers to use PDF data and documents as part of a larger application, reading and writing data out of PDF forms. Supporting PDF through a programmatic platform opens up a new realm for developers, but allowing that interactivity to be delivered via the Flash Player would give end users the ability to take an end run around the heavy and staid Acrobat Reader.