Today, two big mergers went down. The bigger of the two is Adobe's purchase of Macromedia for $3.4 billion. Andy also pointed out GameStop's purchase of Electronique's Boutique for $1.44 billion. Both are significant, but I wonder if either one was necessary.

In the case of Adobe, they picked up Flash, which is probably the main reason for the merger. In my mind, this makes the deal worth it. Adobe had tried to make a go at the market with GoLive, but it never took off. What seems silly though is all of the product crossover (Illustrator and Freehand, Photoshop/Imageready and Fireworks, etc.). Will Adobe just dump Macromedia's versions or what? I am definitely suspicious of how this will effect consumers, but I don't know if this is much of a benefit to Adobe.

The Gamestop/EB merger seems to have little merit, on the other hand. Gamestop is essentially growing its company by buying up another one. As far as I know, they're not gaining any infrastructure or exclusive sales contracts. So, they are just trying to gain marketshare artificially instead of improving the shopping experience or cutting the costs internally. The Yahoo article explained, "GameStop expects the deal to add significantly to its diluted earnings per share in the second half of fiscal year 2005 and in 2006." To me, this says that EB is doing things right, so we'll just them up and hope their success will make us look better.

I guess my real concern is that mergers like this provide little to no benefit to the consumer. Will this merger provide a better experience for me in any way? Only time will tell, but I don't think it's very likely in the Gamestop/EB example. Yes, I will soon be able to return a birthday gift at a slightly more convenient location, but I think the benfits of competition between the two companies would outweigh those of standardization.

It'll be interesting to see what these monlithic companies look like in 10 or 20 years. Will there be just one company serving us all of our movies and music? I hope not, but this "biggest fish in the pond" mentality is beginning to make me nervous.