Since I have been covering the area of eCollaboration (which includes some forms of eLearning) for the last 15 years, I talk to lots of vendors about their plans for collaboration and their future.

A few months ago I talked about Adobe's strategy for moving into collaboration through PDF. With the acquistion of MacroMedia it looks like Adobe will be leaping into the collaboration space even more quickly. Macromdia currently owns Breeze, and the Flash Communications Server (FCS) which is the underlying technology for many of the real time audio and video collaboration service offerings.

The statement from the Adobe press release this morning says "The combination of Adobe and Macromedia strengthens our mission of helping people and organizations communicate better. Through the combination of our powerful development, authoring and collaboration tools - and the complementary functionality of PDF and Flash - we have the opportunity to drive an industry-defining technology platform that delivers compelling, rich content and applications across a wide range of devices and operating systems."

It also looks like Adobe has acquired MacroMedia to enable them to expand more rapidly into the market for audio and video applications for handhelds and other gadgets.

So it will be interesting to see if Adobe either: spins off a collaboration company or business unit from the combination of Breeze, FCS and PDF, or if they will choose to integrate these three technologies into an offering that might even challenge Microsoft.

I would love to hear what you think about this most interesting acquistion