Shuffle at Microsoft

I read today on www.wired.com that Microsoft management is becoming a little miffed at the number of corporate staffers sporting the telltale white ear phones of Shuffle and IPod. The Apple products seem to be in use by up to sixty percent of the Redmond, WA based software company. Though Microsoft creates products for Apple, (and has for more than twenty years) the companies remain great rivals. Bill Gates has never had much respect for Steven Jobs, a non-programmer. Jobs, on the over hand, is not a Bill Gates fan.

Adobe to Purchase Macromedia

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they would purchase Macromedia. Adobe is the maker of Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere and a number of other publishing tools. Macromedia makes the web site design tool, Dreamweaver and Flash, the animation tool.
As a user of a number of these tools, I have a great deal of interest in the ultimate outcome of this purchase. I have used Dreamweaver since version 3 and ColdFusion since version 4.5.
Your guess is as good as mine as to the success of this purchase from a financial perspective. Adobe paid 3.4 billion dollars for Macromedia.
I'm hoping that Adobe will continue developing Fireworks. I have used it since version 3 and find that its intergration with Dreamweaver really saves me time.
I'm also hoping that Adobe will promote ColdFusion even more than has Macromedia. Macromedia purchased ColdFusion from Allaire back about 2002. Under Macromedia's ownership, ColdFusion has been re-written in Java and recently release version 7. The more I learn about .NET, the more I appreciate the ease in which web applications can be written with ColdFusion.