Adobe had an interesting afternoon Thursday.

That’s when the New York Times came out and blogged that it knew from employees and consultants who were involved or simply knew that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Shantanu Narayen, the CEO of Flash-wielding, Apple-banned Adobe, met recently at Adobe’s offices in San Francisco for “secret” talks, and that they talked mostly about Apple’s control over smartphones and how Microsoft and Adobe could join forces in an anti-Apple front and that one of the ways of doing that would be for Microsoft to buy Adobe.

Well, a 3Par-sensitized stock market went nuts, and bid Adobe stock up 17% until trading was halted by volatility-minded circuit breakers. Adobe closed up 11.5% at $28.69 for a market cap of $14.8 billion.

Adobe PR didn’t deny the meeting; it just wouldn’t discuss it.

One source told the Times that Microsoft had courted Adobe a few years ago but got spooked on antitrust grounds. Such concerns supposedly don’t exist anymore.

Then the Wall Street Journal waded in with the observation that Adobe would be better off teaming up with Google because Microsoft is a smartphone loser and between Adobe’s recent Omniture web analytics acquisition and its Photoshop and Dreamweaver web site-designing software, the fit with Google is more natural.

• On Microsoft, Adobe, Flash, and Silverlight