Adobe to Buy MacroMedia for 3.4 Billion in Stock

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq:MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.full release
Not entirely search related, but MacroMedia DreamWeaver & Adobe GoLive are two of the more popular web design software programs on the market. Additionally Adobe created PDF, PhotoShop, and Illustrator. MacroMedia has Flash and ColdFusion.

MacroMedia was also one of the first large software companies to have many employees blog about their work and products.

random tidbit: My old roommate's girlfriend used to work as the secretary for Allaire before MacroMedia bought them out.

Currently Adobe PDF is in a partnership to have their PDF search done with Yahoo! Search. According to the Wall Street Journal the combined Adobe / MacroMedia company looks to be taking on MicroSoft on many fronts.

Mr. Chizen, who took over as chief executive in 2000, has his sights on a larger business-software market, built around Adobe's document-management capabilities. Adobe's sales of such document-management servers were only about $100 million last year, but the company has revamped its salesforce and marketing efforts to push those products, which carry price tags of $50,000 and more.

Documents are the lifeblood of business and governments, and the ability to secure them, sign them and let everybody view them with the free Reader gives Adobe a major head start, he says. "The only other vendor that has that kind of penetration is Microsoft," Mr. Warzecha said.

Macromedia has been working to build its business selling multimedia tools to corporations and media companies. It wants to make Flash the underlying technology to enable users to work with a broad range of applications and devices, such as cellphones, in which small screens and the lack of a full keyboard present special challenges.

In Japan, for example, Macromedia says Flash is used by 60% of the more than 4,000 content suppliers for NTT DoCoMo, Japan's top mobile carrier. Macromedia predicts that in five years, 75% of mobile phones sold will have multimedia capabilities.

Could MicroSoft be fighting on too many fronts?