Michael Dolan Dot Com

Friday, April 27th, 2007

Does Adobe “get it”? It seems they’re learning.

The Battle of the Titans for 2007-10 could be Adobe+Google vs Microsoft (think tag team wresting… I hated WWF…but it fits).

It will be interesting to see Adobe leverage open source as a means to win this game – but, if they did not use an open source tactic here, I’d say the writing was on the wall for Microsoft to take share (I say tactic, b/c they don’t have a full strategy here .. yet at least… please insert Flash/Apollo… ).

Good move by Adobe. The score is Adobe 3, Microsoft 1 by my count. 

Now if I can attempt to script Microsoft’s next move I’ll bet we see Silverlight take an OOXML-like path with some sort of “open” adjective but nothing really open in the sense that “we” would want. Let’s face it Microsoft (and Sun) absolutely cannot stand the thought of Linux growing even more – and so Silverlight will be a half baked attempt to keep Windows users on Microsoft technology with a potential twist to try and speak to sufficient “openness” for 60% of the “community” and customers who prefer open source on Windows anyway. That’s my pure, 100% speculative guesstimate at this time. Microsoft may also chose to do nothing at all…. after all, Microsoft owns native Windows GUI/presentation development. Flash is but a spec of the native user apps that run on Windows. (which could also lead to Microsoft embedding a lightweight CLR into Silverlight as Miguel has speculated)

What would be great is if Microsoft and Adobe could work together on a standard and have a common open source project that could bridge both camps. BUT, I think both companies are still tepid in terms of truly finding ways to move up the stack and compete at new levels instead of at the implementation standard. Adobe is definitely much further ahead though – and if Google or even Eclipse down the road join in, this could get ugly for Microsoft. However, Microsoft seems near intent to prove on their own that they still don’t get it ;-).

All I know is the fun has just begun.