Yes, but Macromedia greatly improved Flash. Now one can argue Director and Flash were kind of the same market, but Adobe has Illustrator(vs freehand), had Goliv

Yes, but Macromedia greatly improved Flash. Now one can argue Director and Flash were kind of the same market, but Adobe has Illustrator(vs freehand), had Golive (vs Dreamweaver), Photoshop (vs Fireworks) and even had its own Flash knock-off (LiveMotion). So way too much redundancy so that most Macromedia product rapidly went unmaintained, or abandoned when Adobe failed to milk them. But where Adobe completely dropped the ball, and where Macromedia strength was is community. Macromedia's product community was incredible. I also can't believe they had that many developers knowing Action Script to throw it all away, there are millions thing Flash could have done, like focus on game dev or desktop dev. It's just that Adobe wasn't willing to invest much in it at some point. Adobe is now trying to get into "app prototyping" but I don't believe a second whatever product they have now is going to last longer than all the prototyping products they had before... They could have easily repurposed Fireworks for collaborative app prototyping... Autodesk also has many software that do more or less the same thing which they acquired, so for years there was very little room for the competition because Autodesk had all the most famous 3D mesh modelling softwares (and still has all the important CAD software, FreeCAD just can't compete with AutoCAD). Even Blender,while great, is still far behind MAYA as a modeler. I think 2 the only products that are still independent are Cinema4D and Rhino.