San Jose (CA) - Adobe does not waste any time to take advantage of the new additions in its product portfolio. After having announced that federal regulators have approved the $3.4 billion acquisition of Macromedia last Friday, the company today announced two bundles that combine Macromedias most successful and more mainstream products with Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium (CS 2 Premium) package.
One bundle claims to cater to design professionals, including the software of CS 2 - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, GoLive, Acrobat 7, and Cue - and Macromedia's Flash Professional 8 animation development tool. Adobe charges $1600 for the combined software, which is about $300 less than the individual packages list for.
More interesting for most Adobe customers, however, may be the Web Bundle, which includes Macromedia's Studio 8 instead of Flash Professional 8. Studio comes with Flash Pro 8, Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, the web site management tool Contribute 8 and Flash Paper 2, an alternative to Adobe's PDF format. The web bundle isn't cheap by any means, but buyers may feel more comfortable shelling out $1900 when they hear that they save $300 over the option to buy the packages separately.
Especially the web bundle reveals the redundancy in Adobe's current product line - such as GoLive and Dreamweaver as well as Acrobat and Flash Paper - and we shouldn't be too surprised, if the company drops one or the other application in the near future. We also expect Adobe to soon announce a strategy of leveraging Macromedia's Flash Lite software for mobile platforms as well as the enterprise presentation platform Breeze.
Related stories:
Feds allow adobe and Macromedia to merge
Adobe to acquire Macromedia in $3.4 billion deal
