Why Adobe, Microsoft are at war

Ever since Adobe bought the $3.4 billion Web graphics development company, Macromedia, in 2005, it has been at loggerheads with Microsoft over competing products.  Sandeep Mehrotra, country sales manager, Adobe, is not exactly losing sleep over it.

Adobe is bound to see competition in the PDF space with players such as Microsoft. Does Adobe feel threatened with the prospect?

Adobe has a lineage of 10 years (in India) in delivering the best communication experience to its customers.

Our solutions are truly cross platform because we are living in a world that is more diverse than ever before, and the fact that our engagement platform works across those platforms gives us the competitive advantage over Microsoft.

Also, because we have been at this for longer than Microsoft have, with document formats and animation formats, we think that we have a competitive advantage, as long as we continue to innovate.

Microsoft last year unveiled an early version of Sparkle, a tool that could compete with Adobe's other core product, Macromedia Flash. Apparently, Microsoft's threat looms over the entire suite of Adobe products, right?

Adobe developed PDF but has made much of its core technology an open standard. Thus, the issue is not whether Microsoft can use the PDF specification, but rather whether they will allow leverage to their dominant position in Windows and Office to muscle into a new competitive space.

Despite all this, in fiscal year 2006, Adobe achieved record revenue of $2.575 billion, compared to $1.966 billion in fiscal 2005. On a year-over-year basis, annual revenue grew 31 per cent, with Adobe witnessing a 40 per cent year-on-year

growth on its Acrobat revenues.

Indians have taken to Acrobat professional as opposed to Acrobat standard. The Acrobat professional version accounts for 60 per cent of Acrobat revenues for Adobe India.

How aggressive will Adobe be in promoting software as a service (SaaS)?

We will invest $100 million in the next three to five years in companies designed on Adobe platform technologies, particularly those delivering applications via Apollo (a new cross-operating system runtime that lets developers leverage existing web technology skills in HTML, Flash and PDF to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications to desktop.

Apollo is scheduled for a preview release in early 2007 and will be offered as free download. We hope through Apollo we can help establish the trend of SaaS to a larger extent.

What we're doing with Flash is forever pushing the boundaries and enabling new things. In Flash 8, we introduced new visual effects, new video codecs, blended alpha channel, new drawing commands.

Which segments will you be targeting with Acrobat 8?

With Acrobat 8, any business or individual knowledge worker can take advantage of the power of PDF forms. We do not believe in painting everyone with the same brush.

We have clearly defined focused areas and have always channelised our resources for each of these areas in very different ways to ensure effective ways of reaching out to our target audiences and showcasing our value to them.