Monday morning M&A

Good morning, faithful FOCEs. I know you've been distraught by my sparse posting the past few days, and there's bad news -- the problem will get worse before it gets better. The Cranky Family is in town today, so I'll be doing some Cranky Sightseeing. But before I leave, a couple stories that merit comment:

First, Adobe is buying Macromedia. This strikes me as a noteworthy event for several reasons. Principally, it's a big deal. As excited as we have all been about the MCI story, it is only one of many mergers and acquisitions that have been launched in the past few months. And that's good news. The uptick in M&A activity is a sign of business optimism.

This particular merger is also worth noting from an excited-tech-geek perspective because it holds out the promise of all sorts of innovations to come from the new company. As suspcious as I usually am about the rationale for mergers and acquisitions, this one seems to make sense. It could just be opening the door to a variety of new Internet document technologies we can't even imagine today.