The news that Adobe are buying the analytics company Omniture for $1.8 billion  http://www.omniture.com/press/777 suggests that Adobe are looking to move firmly into the markets that are controlled by Google and Microsoft. This seems to be a continuation of the direction they embarked on with the aquisition of Macromedia. At that time some commentators assumed it would be merely a fit with their web design and graphics software, but this new move suggests that it was really the Flash format they wanted to control and that they’re moving much more towards tracking and interaction analysis for online marketing.

I have to say I’ve never been a big fan of Adobe – back in the 1990s I developed a dislike of their interfaces in Pagemaker and Photoshop and I’d much rather they’d left Dreamweaver and Fireworks alone. As an SEO I naturally have a jaundiced eye for Flash and as a user who values my privacy I really dislike Flash cookies which seem to be everywhere – since I installed a Firefox plug-in to delete them I’m finding them all over the place. I can’t really blame Adobe for those though – they just aquired something that was already there. However the combination of them and the sort of tracking capability in Omniture (I haven’t used it myself but I’m told by a friend who has that it’s way more detailed than Google Analytics) promises to give Adobe a lot of clout in the targeted adverts and marketing profile business if I’m reading the situation correctly.