In case you hadn’t heard already, Macromedia is being bought by Adobe. This is a huge deal, especially for the web industry. (Read about it at CNET.com)

Me, I’m not pleased to hear it. I sort of like having them compete for market share. Keeps prices down. Increases innovation.

What I hear is that Adobe is poised to be a more head-on competitor to Microsoft. That sounds crazy, as an industry insider, at least as far as off-the-shelf software goes. I’d buy web development software from Adobe or Macromedia before I’d touch any web development software from Microsoft–at least for front-end work.

I’ve viewed Microsoft FrontPage as a breaker of the Garbage In-Garbage Out rule of computing. With FrontPage, you can put awesome code in, and then it gets transformed by M$ FrontPage’s mandatory eatShit&&Die filter, and then you get Garbage Out. Incidentally, I’m pretty sure they use the same filter when saving Word documents as web pages.

Ooookay, didn’t mean to rant.