Goodbye Macromedia.

Last week Adobe completed their acquisition of Macromedia. Not surprisingly, it appears Adobe is retiring the Macromedia brand, as Macromedia’s site now has an Adobe masthead reading “formerly Macromedia.” though products acquired from Macromedia will still include the Macromedia name. Macromedia’s stock (MACR) has ceased trading and was officially converted to Adobe (ADBE) on December 5th, with Adobe announcing plans to lay off an unspecified number of employees. Macromedia (MACR) closed at $48.26 last week, while Adobe (ADBE) climbed to $34.97.

Macromedia’s Masthead

Adobe explains the acquisition will help the company penetrate the mobile, web, and enterprise markets. With Adobe finally taking advantage of the market for mobile content, their Mobile and Device Solutions Business Unit will focus on Flash Lite and FlashCast. The most recent release of Flash came with almost 90 mobile device profiles, with Macromedia pledging to update with every new device supporting Flash Lite. Macromedia Studio, Dreamweaver, and Flash join the Creative Solutions Business Unit and Flex will continue to be marketed as an enterprise and developer solution alongside Adobe LiveCycle. Breeze will be sold under their Knowledge Worker Solutions Business Unit, but Contribute and Captivate will be marketed as part of the Print and Classic Publishing Solutions Business Unit.

The future looks grim for unmentioned products in Adobe’s business units, despite no official mention of being discontinued. Director’s been on borrowed time ever since the belated MX version, and conjointly dropping Freehand comes as no surprise after being exiled from the Studio 8 suite. Sadly, Fireworks doesn’t seem able to hold weight against industry favorite Illustrator, despite its growth in recent years as a solid web graphics application. FlashPaper also seems to have been abandoned, with Adobe planning to combine Adobe Reader and Flash Player. Adobe has no mention of possible discontinued products, though one has to wonder what the future has in store for GoLive, which despite smooth integration with InDesign, never quite caught on.

The company announced three new product bundles: the Adobe Design Bundle (currently available) including Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Flash Professional 8; the Adobe Web Bundle (currently available) including Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium with Studio 8; and the Adobe Video Bundle (expected early 2006 release) with Adobe video Solutions and Flash Professional 8. Both the currently available bundles offer savings from purchasing the Macromedia and Adobe products separately.

Adobe’s biggest obstacle may come from Microsoft’s yet to be released cross-platform Expression suite, which includes Sparkle Interactive, Quartz Web Designer, and the design application in Community Technology Preview, code-named Acrylic. Whether or not the Microsoft products will have competitive leverage is yet to be seen, as they integrate with Visual Studio for development of XAML and .NET based applications for Windows.