Adobe Takes A Leaf Out of Apple's Book

Adobe seems to have taken a leaf out of Apple's playbook. Last week they bought color correction developer IRIDAS, and this week they entered into some kind of arrangement with the developers of Automatic Duck.

Tom Dagion at Adobe says it's a partnership:

So I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to say that Adobe and Automatic Duck are now partnering with the aim of bringing absolute best-of-breed workflow integration into Premiere Pro. This means that, as we work together, Premiere Pro’s ability to integrate with the industry’s other leading tools using technologies like AAF, XML and OMF will get stronger and stronger. And so Premiere’s ability to be a good citizen in all kinds of broadcast and post-production workflows will get better and better.
-Al's Blog / Exciting News

While at Automatic Duck, it seems more like a purchase:

To that end I have joined the Adobe Product Marketing team and am really excited about their products both today and new things yet to be released. Harry Plate (my Dad and the co-Founder of Automatic Duck) will be assisting with the technology integration while continuing to focus on supporting other Automatic Duck partners.

We view our partnership with an Adobe as a great opportunity for our customers, as we will finally be able to offer the same best-in-class quality translation interface for Premiere Pro as we have offered in the past for other video editing products, enabling customers to seamlessly move in and out of Premiere Pro in their editing/processing workflows.
- Wes Plate, co-founder of Automatic Duck
Automatic Duck | News:

Does anyone else find it ironic that Automatic Duck was one of the solutions being pushed for Final Cut Pro X users to solve their XML export issues? Apple might want to rethink that whole third-party developer support idea.

It certainly looks like Adobe is seriously committed to building out their existing technology base. Apple has done that in the past too; though they have had a habit of killing off many of the standalone technologies (Shake, now Color) once they were absorbed. But surely Adobe won't do that (quiet, all you PageMaker, Authorware, FreeHand, PageMill and GoLive users, and we won't mention the first time Adobe abandoned the Macintosh platform.)