Just when you thought people had stopped relating Sept. 11 to dumb s—:

“After 9/11, we both realised that being enemies didn’t make sense,” Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen said in a conference call on Monday, referring to his discussions with Macromedia’s then-CEO Rob Burgess. “We were not longer competing.”

Heartwarming. Luckily, the reporter for ZDNet was having none of it:

In fact, Adobe and Macromedia’s peace pact had less to do with their own sense of corporate or technological comity in the wake of a national tragedy than with serious if not existential common threats, particularly Microsoft.

“When I think about competitors, there’s only one I really worry about,” Chizen said in an interview a year ago. “Microsoft is the competitor, and it’s the one that keeps me up at night.”

Chizen better hope the market believes he’s being insincere. If he’s actually stupid enough to do a merger because he felt bad competing against Macromedia after 9/11, it’s time to start dumping Adobe stock.