It was announced today that Adobe Systems Incorporated will acquire Macromedia in a stock purchase worth about $3.4 billion. I’ll let you read the particulars for yourself, if you’re interested.

The acquisition of Macromedia has been a long time coming; I remember hearing rumors years ago that even Microsoft was interested in them. At least we can be glad that the Boys from Redmond didn’t get their hands around Macromedia’s throat, or you could truly kiss Flash and Dreamweaver goodbye. I have greater faith in Adobe, as I already love their print production, web graphics and illustration software suites, but absolutely hate their HTML editor (GoLive). I hope Dreamweaver doesn’t get sacked in favor of GoLive, because I’ll be truly upset. I don’t know what will become of Macromedia’s Fireworks, a Photoshop competitor.

In fact, there are several areas where Adobe could stand to learn a few things from Macromedia, namely how to run a website—as of this writing, I can’t pull up Adobe’s site at all, and their customer support message boards are atrocious. However, if Macromedia’s excellent products could fit under the wrapper of Adobe’s consistent navigation and interface scheme, it would be an improvement, I think. Dreamweaver’s UI design has always been clunky and wacky in my opinion.