This week, PhotoShop maker Adobe announced that it would purchase Macromedia, maker of such products as Flash, Dreamweaver, and Freehand. The $3.4 billion deal establishes Adobe as one of the most dominant makers of products for Web developers and graphic artists, or what we might call creative professionals. But the purchase also raises many questions, including some antitrust concerns. Oddly enough, representatives from both companies say they're only worried about one competitor, Microsoft, even though the software giant doesn't actually make a single product that competes with anything Adobe or Macromedia makes. But Microsoft's next-generation Windows system, codenamed Longhorn, promises an impressive display subsystem that might compete with both Adobe's PDF format and Macromedia's Flash technologies. Someone's afraid of Microsoft? What is this, 1995?
