What this acquisition demonstrates is that there is a lot of established vendors who have cash burning a hole in their pocket, but no organic sources of growth. Years of bureaucratic culture - I would have said marketing culture but Apple does marketing well, so it would be a disservice to real marketeers to call Adobe's a marketing culture - has destroyed the technology soul of the company. Result: clueless management goes and overpays, aided and abetted by investment bankers (public) or VCs (private).

This disease abounds in the industry. Sun overpaid for a series of companies over a 7 year period; Intuit has acquired and done nothing with a whole lot of them; the less said about Yahoo the better; and VMWare + SpringSource ($400 million?) ...

I guess there is hope for a lot of start-ups yet ;-)