Merger Mania.

This article reports that Avid Technology Inc.'s pending acquisition of Pinnacle Systems Inc. seemed sure to be the video industry story of the year. It's a major shake-up that smartly positions Avid to broaden its customer base and remain the dominant video-editing manufacturer moving forward. Yet early on the first day of NAB2005, Adobe dropped an even bigger bombshell, and announced that it is acquiring one time archrival Macromedia Inc. Arguably, the Avid-Pinnacle merger will still have a more direct effect on higher-end digital video professionals than Adobe buying Macromedia. But at slightly less than a half-billion dollars, the Avid-Pinnacle deal can't touch the 3.4 billion dollars Adobe is paying for Macromedia. Nor does Avid-Pinnacle ultimately reach such a potentially broad cross section of users, including those working in digital video, digital graphics and animation, and publishing, both print and online. Macromedia was the original developer of what is now Apple's Final Cut Pro, but it could not sustain a lengthy development cycle that increasingly came to be a distraction to its core products.