It would seem that hardly any one here understands adobe and their products...
Microsoft would gain a lot. A ton of intellectual property to go with what they have.
Postscripts rendering model is far more flexible and superior to windows GDI model.
It doesn't deprecate existing windows devices, but new devices can be much more capable. Postscript rendering is much more mature in its ability to write to any specific color set, but especially inks. Office has long had an issue in that the renderers were not good enough for sophisticated printing.
Office sharing the renderer with the rest of the CS suite (this is the superior strength of the CS suite compared to other solutions) would be phenomenal.
The word spacing and breaking algorithms of Indesign, the Video components of AE and Premiere, the vector capabilities of Illustrator, the edge detection and manipulation as shown in PS, Trapwise, and AE.
The suite of programs provide a ton of innovative growth into the microsoft customers. Providing program growth and acceptance into a wide range of products.
Flash. This really isn't an Adobe product and could probably use the most help of Microsoft and pockets for security and speed improvements. A lot of the stuff created for IE 9 is sure to make it into VBA and Flash as well. Silverlight as a product will be deprecated into flash that can read silverlight and accomplish silverlight DMA. The lighter and faster that they can create flash, the more they own the tech for now, and when HTML 5 becomes mainstream. The better that they are at rendering which Adobe has huge strengths, and microsoft is developing in-roads the better.
PDF becomes an even bigger player in everyones life, and will not be a printer or something bizarre in windows, but simply a save setting. PDF also shares the Postscript renderer at its core. The ability to store docx and exls files directly without weird workaround, and get faithful pages, and faithful page editting will be a huge benefit to the customer pass.
Quartz is an interesting question. Who knows how this is licensed to Apple and what are the promises going forward. There is a TON of the OSX rendering that depends on quartz. Which is the PDF rendering engine at its heart (from Adobe). Getting the quality of rendering so high and so many services for free, Apple actually released a new operating system that barely did or ran anything, because they new that they would be able to focus on other things in OSX.
A switch of rendering to Postscript, instead of GDI would allow IE to actually run on other platforms with relatively small amounts of engineering.
Imagine a strong core of common content and rendering tools. From authoring to output. And this strong core could be extended and added and conformed for workflows or greater creativity that would support an army of workers joined by a file, where each can add to the file their expertise and training. Authors, designers, illustrators, craftsman, printers, consumers. It has been impossible to do this effortlessly. Different platforms, different customers. It was difficult to actually do the above, and it didn't get done often cuz it was so hard. The merger will have tools to actually make that easy.
Integrating and making the workflow better and easier is much multiyear work. Exploding to even greater utilization of the products suites world wide. This is good for Microsoft, this is good for people that want to make their lives easier.
The intellectual property at Adobe is deep and profound in a number of important pathways and work flows. And monopoly in patent is perfectly LEGAL.
