As of December 3, Macromedia was no more. As of December 5, Adobe has rolled out their new stream lined product line.

As some of you may know Adobe and Macromedia have merged, [here and here]. I thought that with the recent release of CS2 (April 27, 2005 [here]), it would take atleast until the first quarter of 2006 for them to bundle together the products. I really thought that they would have merged the competing products, such as Dreamweaver and GoLive. It looks like they are going to do something similar to the change to InDesign. They kept the horrible PageMaker on for years, slowly weening people over the the real software. I think that they will eventually absorb the Macromedia acquisition into their own line of products, but that will take a few years.
Adobe bought Macromedia, at least in my opinion, to stop Microsoft from making an inroad in the graphics business. I know that Microsoft has been trying to with the development of Acrylic and Paint.net (independant I know, but MS will snap that up soon), and I think that it was smart for Adobe to get Macromedia when it did, but can consolidation be that great?
When I was in school there were feuds between professors about which software packages where superior. There were two camps, Adobe and Macromedia, both firmly entrenched from years of work experience with each respective product. This wasn’t for every product the companies produced. There were concessions, Photoshop for image editing, and outsider Quark for page layout, but in the arenas of vector based images and web software, the glove came off. It was very interesting that in two software classes I was forced to learn Freehand in one, and Illustrator in the other, doing essentially the same assignment in both. I know that this cross training was good, I think that it prepared me to be able to use any product out there (sodipodi, anyone), but at the time it seemed duplicitous.
The funny thing is this: In education, the technology trickles down. We learned Quark, becuase it was the “standard” and InDesign was “too new” and “untested”. Everyting that I had heard from the outside world was that InDesign was the way to go. So while the Adobe and Macromedia product lines are slowly being consolidated, what effect will this have on Graphic Design education? Will two programs continue to be taught when the endgame is to have one? Is InDesign finally ready for classroom approval?