It is not by any means a foregone conclusion that Adobe is going to win the battle for the Web designer software market. Of course, we have to remember that Adobe has, in addition to the Web design software, a huge share of the document publishing and photo-editing software markets, as well as chunks of additional markets. So, Web publishing isn't the only game in town for Adobe. It is, however, the company's largest revenue source. For Macromedia, the Web design market is pretty much the whole enchilada.
Web publishing happens to be one of the fastest-growing sectors in the packaged software industry.
To get some sense of how fast this market is growing, I talked to Roger Lanctot, the director of research at PC Data, which is a market research company that tracks sales for virtually every computer-related product. According to Roger, this most recent quarter was one of flat and even negative growth for the vast majority of packaged software product categories. There is a lot of other useful information on PC Data's website , some of which we will use in our analysis of companies we will be looking at later on in our software study. If you're interested in the software sector, you might enjoy perusing their site. So, while Adobe has what looks like a hammerlock on the document management and photo-editing markets, Macromedia represents stiff competition in the Web design segment.