Microsoft: Adobe's Friend or Foe?
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Tonight, in San Jose, Calif., Adobe celebrates its 25th anniversary. When the confetti settles, Adobe must look ahead to a tough second quarter century. Its once strong partner Microsoft is now a competitor in almost every line of business. |
I spent most of Tuesday in San Jose at Adobe's corporate headquarters and the local convention center. Adobe's annual sales conference was this week, and I had been asked to come speak about Microsoft competition.
When I worked as an analyst, Adobe would have paid a hefty consulting fee for my time. As a journalist, I paid my own way. Adobe was kind enough to set up separate hour-long interviews with executives Rick Brown and Mike Hilton to discuss, respectively, the Acrobat and Creative Suite businesses. The podcast with Hilton is already available.
While my presentation covered many different topics, Silverlight got the most attention. Silverlight poses considerable, potential threat to Adobe's Flash business, and it's important to understand why the technology is wooing some developers. My eWEEK colleague Daryl Taft's Monday story on Silverlight gives good perspective on developer interest.
Through most of 2006 and a good part of 2007, Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere was a seemingly dead end technology. Some journalists and bloggers called WPF/E a "Flash killer," but the only thing dead was developer interest in the Microsoft technology. Sure, that's an overstatement, but one meant to make a point. WPF/E didn't have much visibility beyond loyal .NET developers or reporters and bloggers writing about the "Flash killer."
Then Microsoft took surprising action—at least compared to its typical product/technology behavior. Microsoft rebranded WPF/E as Silverlight. Suddenly Silverlight was everywhere: The news, the blogs and developer hangouts. Silverlight's success so far is much more about branding and marketing than it is about technology. Reasons why Silverlight caught on, while WPF/E didn't:
- Microsoft came out with a simple, clean product name and easily recognizable logo
- Microsoft reached out to news media and developers through press releases, interviews, blogs and Channel 9 & 10 videos (so successful was the media response, it was like Microsoft launched a new product)
- Silverlight code was immediately available for developer use
- Microsoft provided 4GB of storage for developers to place their Silverlight projects (this was huge)
- Silverlight let developers easily use existing tools and, perhaps most importantly, tap into existing Windows Media Video content
Windows Presentation Foundation is about as nowhere as Silverlight before the rebranding. Yahoo announced a WPF-supporting messenger product in January, but only delivered a de-featured preview last week. Yahoo Messenger for Vista is benchmark for broader WPF support. Maybe it's time Microsoft consider rebranding and relaunching WPF, too.
Silverlight is a good metaphor for Adobe-Microsoft competition. Maybe microcosm would be better descriptor. Adobe is perhaps the largest Windows developer other than Microsoft. But Adobe is regarded by some people at Microsoft as being disloyal. Adobe isn't a .NET shop. Adobe's disloyalty is one of the major reasons why Microsoft competes more with its longstanding partner. .NET is the centerpiece of Microsoft's whole product strategy. Everything revolves around .NET in some way or another. Somebody has to bring .NET to the enterprise. If Microsoft partners like Adobe won't do it, then Microsoft will.
Another reason for increased competition is more problematic. Microsoft competes with most of its partners in some way or another, because the company provides major operating systems and supporting applications. Microsoft's application business competes with applications its partners develop for Windows or Windows Server. Because of market saturation of cash cow products Office and Windows, Microsoft has expanded its applications business into more areas that compete with more partners.
Adobe is standing in the frontline of competition. It's hard to find a line of business where Adobe and Microsoft don't compete.
Increased competition has helped Adobe become more focused. "The prospect of competing is really, in a way, a galvanizing event," said Brown, who is Adobe's director of product management for Acrobat. Adobe products are better because of increased Microsoft competition, he said.
While Adobe celebrates its first 25 years today, the company entered its second quarter century on December 2. Where will the company be in 2032? It had better be around, because archivists around the word are digitizing documents into Adobe's PDF under the presumption it will be around for at least another 100 years.
Related Posts:
- Adobe: 25 Years and Counting, Microsoft Watch, Dec. 13, 2007
- What's in a Name, Microsoft Watch, Oct. 9, 2007
- Adobe-Microsoft Collision Course, Microsoft Watch, Oct. 4, 2007
- Silverlight: What's in a Name?, Microsoft Watch, April 16, 2007
- Apollo Is No Flash in the Pan, Microsoft Watch, March 19, 2007
Comments (12)
Remove Mono dependency from Ubuntu
http://lost-midnight.blogspot.com/2007/12/remove-mono-dependancy-from-ubuntu.html
Quotes from the link:
"There has been a wide range of discussion on the subject of Mono and its inclusion in Ubuntu by default. Some people believe that Mono may infringe on Microsoft patents while others believe that it is useful to include. Personally, I have no idea about whether Mono does infringe on Microsoft patents, but I see other reasons why Ubuntu should remove it."
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Yes, I see other clear reasons to remove Mono, the Suse developed jointly with M$ version of Silverlight for Linux distros. First on my list would be because I don't want to contribute any click thru revenue back to microsoft for playing any of silverlights advertisements. Second, the advertisements.
Adobe on the other hand is well established with Flash, and supports Linux and Mac with native versions that Adobe makes, unlike the schemes and scams of M$. Adobe has other Aces up its sleeves in its battle with MS. Photoshop is still king, no matter how hard MS has tried to replace it. Another thing to look towards, is I believe at some future, not too distant point is that Adobe will port many of its apps to Linux, unlike MS, which will only do that when and if the market share makes a big shift.
Posted by chips | December 13, 2007 8:02 PM
For M$ to grow, it has to grow sideways, that is to take over products that its partners now make. And there are perhaps only 3 areas where it can do this.
1. Adobe products, which it has been competing.
2. Sercurity products. Think Norton and McAfee. Onecare and the locking out of the kernel of Vi$ta are two clear keys that Micro$oft is bringing the power of its monopoly to bear on these products in an unfair way.
3. PC Games. Another area that MS already makes quite a bit of software.
Posted by chips | December 13, 2007 8:07 PM
Can Microsoft bring .Net?
Somebody has to bring .NET to the enterprise. If Microsoft partners like Adobe won't do it, then Microsoft will.
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FRIDAY, APRIL 20, 2007
Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. Files Patent Infringement Lawsuit Against Microsoft Corporation
Fort Worth, TX, April 20, 2007 (PRIME NEWSWIRE)? Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. (OTCBB: VCSY)(www.vcsy.com) announced today that on April 18, 2007, Vertical Computer Systems, Inc. filed suit for patent infringement against Microsoft Corp. in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. VCSY claims that the Microsoft .Net System infringes U.S. Patent No. 6,826,744.
Posted by I-Man | December 13, 2007 8:48 PM
Opera vs. IE: Round One, Fight!
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/opera_vs_ie_round_one_fight.php
Quotes from the link:
"Opera wants the EU to force Microsoft to stop bundling IE, or to bundle other browsers with the OS (i.e., Opera). They also request that the EU make Microsoft follow "fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities."
This is not an unfamiliar argument to Microsoft -- that tiff with the Justice Department was about much the same thing. But, as Larry Dignan points out, Opera might find a more receptive audience in the European Union than Netscape found in the US DoJ. The European Union has already ruled that bundling Windows Media Player with Windows was illegal, so a precedent in Opera's favor appears to exist"
Posted by chips | December 13, 2007 10:02 PM
Microsoft MSN Ads clogging the tubes: Digg + Hotmail
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071212/msn-ads-clog-internet-digg-hotmail/
Quotes from the link:
"Over the last few days I’ve noticed Digg.com has slowed to a crawl where it would take up to a half a minute to load each page. At first I thought it was Digg, but then I noticed “connecting to ads1.msn.com” in my status bar when apparently nothing would happen. Is there something wrong with Microsoft’s advertising network?
In this case, Microsoft’s ad servers (in particular, ads1.msn.com) is taking around 27 seconds to respond to the request for a simple 5KB Javascript file used to propagate websites with banner advertisements. In contrast, Digg’s server responds on average in less than 100ms.
On another site, Microsoft’s own Live Hotmail, the advertising banners served by ads1.msn.com and takes around 27 seconds as well to load. However unlike Digg, Hotmail’s ads are not placed at the top of the HTML so it does not hinder displaying the rest of the page’s contents."
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The gang (M$) that can't shoot striaght.
Posted by chips | December 13, 2007 10:42 PM
It also didn't help Adobe to mouth off about their product's superiority over Microsoft's offerings.
Posted by John Obeto | December 14, 2007 12:37 AM
what is it with those spamming folks up there? it's not viagra or something, but what the hell has it to do with the subject of this and/or all the other stories of joe during the last couple of weeks? this is no discussion or commenting anymore... it's just spam.
Posted by roland | December 14, 2007 2:24 AM
Given the frequency with which Adobe's current Flash player (and versions prior) crashes IE7, and the fact that the version that supposedly fixes it has been in beta for MONTHS, maybe some serious competition is just what the doctor ordered for them to up their game a bit.
Posted by Keith P. | December 14, 2007 12:48 PM
Quote:
Keith P. :
Given the frequency with which Adobe's current Flash player (and versions prior) crashes IE7
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LOL Perhaps, this would be a far better arguement for M$ fixing IE7 which is know to have lots of bugs? Or better, for users to switch to Firefox or Opera, which have fewer bugs, and run flash fine. Or perhaps to switch to Linux with Firefox and or Opera, which again run Flash just fine. In the end, though, perhaps the problem with IE7 is the fact it does not conform to standards, see the Opera suite comments about Opera suing M$ in the EU.
Posted by chips | December 14, 2007 1:16 PM
Chip,
According to Adobe's forums (where there are about 15 pages of complaints about it), it's because MS decided in IE7 to lower the size of memory chunks the browser doles out to the plug-ins that it hosts. Flash hasn't been adjusted to ask for the smaller chunks, so high-color/data Flash apps, it starts trying to touch memory it doesn't own. Shame on MS for not doing a catch-all for stuff it hosts so the whole "OS" doesnt' crash, but shame on Adobe for sitting on the release for months.
Posted by Keith P. | December 14, 2007 3:32 PM
Adobe is making PDF an open standard, so no need to worry about archival access.
Posted by David Mackey | December 15, 2007 7:39 PM
Well, well...looks like I spoke too soon. Adobe finally released the updated version of Flash 2 weeks ago. We'll see how this one fares on IE7
Posted by Keith P. | December 17, 2007 11:56 AM