At first I was very skeptical about this preview. Any tool with the promise that you can design just like print and »publish HTML websites without writing code« probably won't output good markup. And right we are; the markup isn't good right now. Just have a look at the Muse website, which is built with Adobe Muse and you can see the overuse of nested div elements and no good semantics. We do not like this at all. And that's one way of looking at it.
Then I changed my perspective.
37 Signals is one example of companies that skipped using Photoshop.
There has been a long discussion within the web design community about not having the right tool for designing website. Creating images in Photoshop and showing to clients is one way, but it's only an image. It's not in the right context; in a browser. It's not clickable. The font rendering is not right. Yeah, the list is long.
Some even prefer to start design directly in the browser with HTML/CSS and I definitely think that works for a certain kind of projects. Usually it's not the case with websites for brand presences. Clients want to see the website.
I welcome Adobe Muse in this space. It's not a tool for creating websites (I would probably never publish from Muse) but it's a tool for design and layout of a website. In the design phase you don't really need nice and tidy markup. That's for later. But I wouldn't mind if the HTML/CSS output would be just a couple of years in the future. It is a preview—hopefully it will improve. Please?
It's InDesign with HTML output. It's better than Photoshop (let's hope the 1.0-release will be, it still lack features) but it's far from perfect. And isn't it what we've been waiting for? For me Adobe Muse fits in my workflow. With Photoshop to make mood boards, Muse to layout the website and then do the HTML/CSS separately or by an awesome front end developer. Yes, it's doing it again and yes, it should be enough with mood board and then layout with HTML/CSS. But my clients aren't there. Yet. And yes, it's doing it again. Where I work, we already have this double workload and it's not good. That's the negative aspect and Adobe Muse as it is right now doesn't fix that problem. That, and the fact that Adobe makes another product to profit from me.