With the acquisition of MacroMedia finalized Dec. 5, Adobe Systems
announced three new product bundles combining the design and creation
tools of Adobe with the Web publishing technology of Macromedia.
The three bundles include Adobe Design Bundle, Adobe Web Bundle and Adobe Video Bundle.
Design Bundle combines the Adobe Creative Suite 2
Premium with Flash Professional 8 software. Creative Suite 2, released
in April, integrates Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe InDesign CS2, Adobe
Illustrator CS2 and Adobe GoLive CS2 software – with the all-new
Version Cue CS2 as well as Adobe Stock Photos service, Adobe Bridge and
includes Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional software. $1,599.00
Web Bundle offers Macromedia Studio 8 (Macromedia
Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8, Contribute 3,
FlashPaper 2) with Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium. $1,899.00
Adobe will also be releasing a Video Bundle in mid
January that will include Adobe’s video and audio products available in
mid-January. No further details are available.

More information
about the bundles are available here.

“When I look at the synergies of the two companies, one of the key ones
is Flash that provides rich media on the Web and Adobe, where our
mission is to enable people in rich media communication,” said Simon
Hayhurst, director of product management for Adobe Video and Audio
products. “So those two goals are very closely aligned and bringing
those two groups together, it’s clear we should be able to drive strong
integration between video and Flash.”
While the two companies were precluded from undertaking joint
engineering efforts until the deal was final, they had
been working together as separate companies to form better integration
among their products.
“Before the acquisition, Adobe had approached Macromedia to work
together to get better integration of Flash export to our products.
There are things we’ve added codecs for Flash video files because we
could do that as a separate company and those discussions were in the
works before the acquisition announcement last NAB,” explained
Hayhurst. “In terms of our engineering teams working together, that was
only allowed to start two days ago and it’s way too early to talk about
future plans."
While Hayhurst noted that it will be some time before joint engineering
efforts produce any completely new products, seamless integration
between Adobe’s video creation tools and Macromedia’s publishing tools
are clearly on the horizon.
“If you look at the things that were recently added in Flash like the
simple keying introduced. Then you look at the richness of the
one-click keying in After Effects and you can see clearly the advantages
of pairing those two tools. Bringing together the steam Flash has been
picking up with streaming video with the rich set of creation tools of
Adobe is the start of something wonderful for the industry."