I find the timing of the article pretty ironic. Its interesting that you bring that up. I think you could be right that Adobe would be a good acquisition for Microsoft although merely talking about search Adobe doesn't fit will into that strategy. Microsoft is struggling to capitalize in search space and they obviously find it an important piece of the puzzle. At this moment Yahoo was their best fit in order to increase their market share. I am not quite so sure if they can do that with adobe.

Although i think a mash-up of Microsoft and Adobe technologies would be cool to see.

Adobe is clearly not going to help Microsoft with search. I'm just not sure that search isn't a bit of a lost cause for them anyway.

For enterprise search their acquisition of FAST should have a very strong impact. I wouldn't count them out for intranet oriented solutions.

Partnering with Yahoo would have given them dominant market share in IM and Mail - which means more data to play with to beat Google out of the advertising/search market. Advertising/search brings revenue, unlike Flash or Silverlight.

I'm not sure why I'm not seeing it, but could someone expound on what "owning" Flash would even give MS, aside from bragging rights...

Flash going under Microsoft control would be a nightmare scenario for me. Noooo!

It might be bad enough to get the government involved again. The government killing flash would be awesome.

Awesome? It would kill my project and many others, e.g. YouTube. I hope Adobe opens everything up before any of that happens. "In the long run, the utility of all non-free software is zero."

HTML will get native video support in the future so we won't need flash for it anymore.

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video

Flash is good for more than just video. E.g. I think http://samorost2.net cannot be reimplemented with existing "open web" technologies. At least I haven't seen any compelling examples.