I just read two interesting articles where Bruce Chizen spoke with John Boudreau from the San Jose Mercury News, the big newspaper of the silicon valley (and not far from Adobe’s San Jose Headquarters).

The first was a Q&A about the Macromedia acquisition, where he asked about the reality of the two companies integrating, the potential death of Adobe or Macromedia product lines, and Microsoft’s looming stance over both companies. While the answers weren’t as deep as Flash fanatics would like, I thought the answers were interesting.

Particularly interesting was his answer about the product line redundancy. When asked if they would move to eliminate products, Chizen responded:

“I don’t think so. That’s not the intent. However, until we get through the integration and until we better understand their business and own them, I can’t commit one way or another.”

While that all is fairly expected PR response, I thought it was more optimistic for Macromedia’s products than previous comments in the announcement FAQ.

The other article focuses on Adobe’s future (which of course includes Macromedia). The thrust of the article is that video and mobile are the future. Well, listening to the recent Macromedia keynotes, they would seem to agree.

This article was an interesting look at Adobe’s arrogance. Every company is arrogant about something, it is just interesting to see what each company holds so dear. While talking about how so much in the world is touched by adobe products, he mostly cited print items, and one film example. That seemed amazingly backwards looking. No mention of the decidedly Adobe influence on design tools for the Internet? That seems strange.

When he did move to the Internet space, it was all PDF all the time. It did sadly sound a bit like Macromedia defending the business model of a free player, but in this rant, he said something that made me go “huh??”

“Apart from HTML, there is more PDF out there on the Web than any other format”

Uh? Flash? Just looking at ad banners alone if there aren’t tremendously more than PDFs I’ll be shocked. But let’s go for the easier to prove formats. jpg? gif? There may even be more midi, mp3s, .mov, and .wmvs than PDFs, though I could be wrong. Hopefully once the Macromedia folks are in the door at Adobe, they will start gushing over Flash instead.

Update: I just looked back at the announement FAQ I mentioned in the post. It is now pretty different from my recollection (not sure which changed though)