Its looking pretty definate that Adobe is going to buy out Macromedia and so I´ve started thinking about what this might mean for the various products lines that they have. To be honest I don´t use Adobe desktop software that much since I´m not really a creative/print/publishing type person anyway. As far as image manipulation goes then Fireworks as part of Studio MX does everything I need to do. As far as other Adobe technologies are concerned, PDF is the only one that springs to mind. We use PDFs on a daily basis for automatic generation and printing of invoices from our online ventures, but this is all done by PHP scripts using the PDF specification as opposed to the full version of Acrobat. So when it comes to Adobe any changes they make to their software and technologies won´t bother me at all (the PDF generation is set up and uses PostScript from a Linux server so won´t need to be changed at all.
Macromedia is a different matter though. I have Dreamweaver open 24/7 and also use Flash and Fireworks some times. I like the UI in the current versions and find that the intergrated nature of the products is very handy. They are also very stable on my system (if they aren´t on your tell Macromedia, not me) and make my life a lot easier. My only concern is that if Adobe start messing around with them too much they might end up as the bloated, crash-prone beasts that a lot of Adobe products have become. This would be an absolute nightmare and might make me switch to another platform. Since most of what I do is MySQL and PHP code editing the main benefit of Dreamweaver to me is the code highlighting, code hints for PHP functions and the integrated FTP utility, but if they muck up the product I should be able to find something similar elsewhere.
Flash is a great programme and they are doing great things with it as a server-type platform as well, but I have limited flash knowledge so anything they do that might be of use to us would require learning something new anyway, so this only leaves the question of Fireworks.Since it can be considered a competing product for Illustrator, cances are that one of them will get dropped and I think that it will be Fireworks. This doesn´t bother me too much but hopefully they will take certain aspects from both products, i.e. Fireworks simplicity of use and Illustrators more advanced capabilities. Ah well, I can dream.
On the bright side they should hopefully combine PDF and SWF into a great document format and multimedia/server archtechure. Since M$ are planning something similar with Longhorn then this could be the best thing the companies could do to capture the online and print creative markets. Only time will tell.